With SEAL you will be able to find metadata in any document to analyze its origin. In this way you will know the operating system that has been used, the creation date and the username, among other data.
So you can perform this task It will be necessary for you to know in which OS you can use FOCA and what steps you should do if you have a Windows or MacOS computer.
You will find all this information in this post. This will help you to analyze the results in a practical way., since you will know the process that you must carry out easily.
What is FOCA and what is this tool for?
Metadata is used not only in a computing environment but also in any content that reveal information about a certain item. In this way it is possible to define that metadata are references that are obtained from a data set and that are used to know about a precise explanation or statement. Within computing metadata are tags used to retrieve information that is studied when a resource is stored together with others.
And thanks to this method, the task of knowing special characteristics that any element of the group to which it belongs is facilitated. From all this it follows that many times Separate data is not relevant for anyone, except for those entities that study the set of these data for a description of the characteristics of that data group. Thanks to this, different aspects that this set contains can be standardized. It is possible to find different types of metadata.
For example; the descriptive ones, which are in charge of studying the data origin; the administrative metadata; the structural, that provide information on the relationships between the different resources; and the markup language metadata, related to characteristics of structures. In order to study the metadata there are different tools, the best known being the software called FOCA. This is due to the characteristics that it presents and that facilitates versatility and its handling at different levels.
The program “Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives “ is a tool that allows study and obtain information from metadata belonging to a document, to a web page or multimedia files. In this way, it is possible to know (thanks to FOCA) information related to the name of the user who created the document, the server from which the item was sent and even the electronic device that was used to create the file.
What do I need to be able to use FOCA? What operating systems can it be used on?
The system FOCA can be used in a Windows environment, but it does not mean that you cannot work with others. We will start with Linux, especially in Kali Linux distro, so we will show you below how you should proceed.
The steps you will have to do are:
- Open terminal and install Wine. For this you will have to enter the command
apt-get install wine. - Next, you must download SEAL through
https://github.com/ElevenPaths/FOCA. - After a few minutes you will have to run the command
sh winetricks gdiplus fontfix dotnet2. - This will allow you download the DLL, which are dynamic link libraries that will help you install FOCA support programs. Copy these files into the folder called Plugins of the FOCA software (for this you will have to go to the file explorer, open the folder SEAL and then choose Plugins).
- When you are done you will have to right click on the folder and select the option Run with Wine.
If you want to use it directly in Windows you will have to perform the execution by means of the reimplantation of the programming interface of Win16 Y Win32. That is, you must also do it through the set of tools Wine.
To use this program loader you will have to:
- Unzip the executable from SEAL. You will have to enter your browser and write the URL
https://www.elevenpaths.com/es/labstools/foca-2/index.html, then you must click the button to download. - Go to the binder in which you have Discharged the program.
- Open the file called bin and click on the executable (that is, in the file that has an extension .exe).
- As after installation the operating system will ask you to grant the administrator permission, so you will have to press Yes when a warning window appears.
In case you want to use FOCA on MacOS, you can also do it, for this you will have to follow these steps once you have downloaded FOCA:
- Unzip the executable file from FOCA on your Mac.
- Do the same with the code libraries, that is the DLLs.
- Then put these libraries in the folder bin that you will find it in the installation of SEAL.
- At this time, you will have to install WineBottler, according to the version you have of the operating system.
https://winebottler.kronenberg.org/ - Then run the one with this extension.exe.
- The Setup Wizard it will ask you if you want to run the program once or create a package for MacOS. So you must choose the second option.
- Add fontfix, dotnet20 and gdiplus to finish and be able to execute SEAL in Mac.
Learn step by step how to find metadata in documents with FOCA
Once you know the steps to install SEAL on any operating system, we will show you the steps you have to do to use this program and get the most out of it.
If you want to find metadata of a document using FOCA, you will have to do this step by step:
Open the metadata analysis program
Once you have open SEAL and you need to analyze a document you will have to go to the configuration panel that is located on the left of the screen interface and choose the option Metadata. Then you will have to right click on an empty part of the area in which it returns the results and select Add file (You will find this on the right side).
But if what you need It is not studying the data of a single file but that of an entire folder, you will have to choose another option, called Add folder. In both cases, the program will take you to the file explorer of your computer so that you can choose the element you want.
Add the document or folder
Right now you will have to choose the document you want to analyze and upload it to FOCA. For this, you will have to right click on it and select the option Extract Metadata which will open in the pop-up window. This will start the auditing process by the system once it is added to the work pane.
Analyze the results
After a few minutes, FOCA will show you a report with all the metadata it extracted. You will be able to analyze file information, users, creation date and software used, among other elements, on the right side of the program.