NTFSx README File

Author: Joshua Stone yakovdk@gmail.com Date: 2012-06-03 13:55:40

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Method of operation
3. Known Limitations
4. Implementation

1 Introduction

NTFSx is a tool that extracts files from a running system's NTFS filesystem. This is accomplished in a non-intrusive fashion.

• Only Administrator-level permissions are required
• No changes are made to the system
• There is no dependency on particular service configurations

This is particularly handy when you need to extract a copy of system files such as NTDS.dit (the storage location for account details, including password hashes, in a modern Active Directory domain). There may also be other times when this may be useful, so you can use NTFSx to extract any file from the filesystem.

2 Method of operation

NTFSx works at the hard drive level. It parses the NTFS data structures on the disk and identifies the block-offsets at which the operating system stores the the desired file(s).

Once identifying these locations, NTFSx extracts these one block at a time into new files stored in the current directory. Since the physical device file is opened with READ-ONLY rights, this is a very safe and non-intrusive operation. It turns out that Microsoft chose to permit administrator users to access physical devices (e.g., the "\.\C:" device, which is the C: drive), thus not requiring SYSTEM access.

Due to the existence of many system administration tools that access raw disk volumes, Microsoft considers this not to be a significant security issue. Nevertheless, it is useful in penetration tests, security audits, etc.

3 Known Limitations

NTFSx is a relatively simple implementation, and thus incurs certain limitations. These have been deemed acceptable for a publicly released tool. It is possible that future releases of NTFSx may eliminate some of these limitations:

• The %SYSTEMROOT% is assumed to be the C: drive

• Some race conditions may exist, such as if the kernel is in the process of writing to SAM or SYSTEM.

  • My recommendation would be to just run it again if you get a corrupt file

4 Example Usage

You will need to copy the EXE file up to the system from which you want to extract files. Running NTFSx without arguments will give you a usage statement that may be more current than this README file.

To extract the NTDS password databases from a running system, the following command should generally work. It may take several minutes, depending on the size of the master file table (MFT).

C:\>ntfsx ntds

You can also extract a file by specifying the path. The second argument specifies the filename to write with the contents:

C:\>ntfsx Windows\system32\config\SYSTEM SYSTEM.OUT

4 Implementation

NTFSx is written exclusively in the Haskell programming language, using the Glasgow Haskell Compiler suite (GHC). It features a native implementation of NTFS (at least for the purposes of parsing and reading it), also written in Haskell. The executable should be quite portable, as it does not rely on any runtime libraries or environment.