Network Forensics Analysis

Network Forensic Analysis

Analyzing packet captures and network evidence for security investigations — from capture methodology through protocol analysis, timeline reconstruction, and evidence preservation.

When to Use

• Investigating a security incident from network evidence
• Analyzing pcap files for indicators of compromise
• Reconstructing network sessions and timelines
• Preparing network evidence for legal proceedings

Forensics Process

FORENSICS_PHASES = {
    'preservation': 'Capture and hash evidence, maintain chain of custody',
    'triage': 'Identify suspicious sessions, IPs, ports, and protocols',
    'analysis': 'Deep packet inspection, protocol decode, file extraction',
    'correlation': 'Correlate with logs, endpoints, and threat intel',
}

Common Pitfalls

1. Truncated captures — missing packet payloads lose evidence
2. No chain of custody — evidence integrity must be provable
3. Analyzing originals — always work from copies, not original evidence
4. Missing encrypted traffic — focus on metadata, DNS, TLS handshakes
5. No timeline — timestamps need synchronized clocks (NTP)

Verification Checklist

• Full packet captures with timestamps
• Cryptographic hashes of evidence files
• Chain of custody documented
• Timeline reconstructed from multiple sources
• Protocol analysis for HTTP, DNS, TLS covering attack vector