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The Windows registry contains a plethora of information in a hierarchical database. It includes system-wide settings, user preferences, installed programs, and recently accessed files and maintains timestamps that can be used to construct a detailed timeline of user activities. However, these data are unencrypted and thus vulnerable to exploitation by malicious actors who gain access to this repository. To address this security and privacy concern, we propose a novel approach that efficiently encrypts and decrypts sensitive registry data in real time. Our developed proof-of-concept program intercepts interactions between the registry’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and other Windows applications using an advanced hooking technique. This enables the proposed system to be transparent to users without requiring any changes to the operating system or installed software. Our approach also implements the data protection API (DPAPI) developed by Microsoft to securely manage each user’s encryption key. Ultimately, our research provides an enhanced security and privacy framework for the Windows registry, effectively fortifying the registry against security and privacy threats while maintaining its accessibility to legitimate users and applications.

 

The Windows registry stores a glut of information containing settings and data utilized by the Microsoft operating system (OS) and other applications. For example, information such as user credentials, installed programs, recently used applications and documents, accessed resources such as local, remote, and removable devices can all be found in this database. More revealingly, the registry also has time and date stamps that can help build a timeline of user activities. The Windows registry can be easily queried by either malicious or benign applications. This is possible through the Windows Application Program Interface (API) and other OS built-in utilities. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a program able to collect and infer a user’s rich activities by accessing the Windows registry alone. This information, also referred to as the user’s digital footprint, can be used to devise an exploit or create a privacy threat. Our custom developed application will demonstrate how a user’s digital footprint can be acquired by a malicious application from a Windows registry, without alerting security software. In addition, this information can be exported to a set of comma delimited files, making it easy to import them into other analysis applications.