An Efficient Approach to Recover CCTV Video from Proprietary DVR File System

CCTV cameras are extensively used for surveillance in areas that may need monitoring. CCTV footages serves an important key for investigation, as evidence in court. Nowadays, the CCTV manufacturers uses proprietary file system instead of the industry standard file system such as FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, HFS, Ext2 etc. The forensic analysis of proprietary DVR is a challenging task, as it uses a proprietary file system and not a standard one. The aim of this project is to analyze the File System of a proprietary DVR Hard Disk Drive of HIKVISION CCTV camera, a popular brand in market. This method involves reverse engineering the File System by reading and extracting CCTV videos and its metadata from the proprietary DVR Hard Disk Drive for the digital forensic investigation.