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Investigating Installed Programs

19/11/2021 Friday

The Windows Registry maintains a great deal of information regarding system configuration, user activity and so on. Installed Programs artifact is among the useful artifacts extracted from the registry hives. The artifact contains details about the applications installed on the system.


Digital Forensics Value of Installed Programs Artifact


Installed Programs artifact retain information such as the name of the installed application, version, size, publisher, date when the application was last installed or updated, location of the application's executable and many other details related to the applications installed on the system. Retrieving such information may have a significant impact on forensic examinations.


Location of Installed Programs Artifact


Installed Programs artifact is extracted from the SOFTWARE registry hive at the following locations:

The NTUSER.DAT hive also stores information related to the applications installed on the system at:


Structure of Installed Programs Artifact


The Uninstall key contains information related to the applications installed on the system. As demonstrated in the figure below, each application installed has its own key. The values within each subkey contains detailed information about that application such as the name of the installed application, version, size, and so on.


Analyzing Installed Programs Artifact with ArtiFast Windows


This section discusses how to use ArtiFast Windows to analyze Installed Programs artifact from Windows machines and what kind of digital forensics insight we can gain from the artifact.

After you have created your case and added evidence for the investigation, at the Artifacts Selection phase, you can select Installed Programs artifact:






Once ArtiFast parser plugins complete processing artifacts for analysis, it can be reviewed via “Artifact View” or “Timeline View”, with indexing, filtering, and searching capabilities. Below is a detailed description of Installed Programs artifact in ArtiFast Windows.


Installed Programs Artifact

This artifact contains information related to the applications installed on a system. The details you can view include:



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