Reverse engineering a CCTV system, a case study

Abstract

Given a disk image of a CCTV system with a non-standard file system, how is the data interpreted? Work has been done in the past detailing the reverse engineering of proprietary file systems and on the process of recovering data from CCTV systems. However, if given a disk image without the CCTV system itself, or if under time constraints, the task becomes much more difficult. This paper explains a different approach to recovering the data and how to make sense of data on a CCTV disk. The method does not require extensive reverse engineering of the CCTV system, or even to have access to the CCTV system itself.