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program-compatibility-assistant.md

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Program Compatibility Assistant (PCA) - PcaAppLaunchDic.txt

Program Compatibility Assistant (PCA) is a feature introduced since Windows 8 intended for application compatibility purposes. New to Windows 11 (22H2 Update) is the ability to extract detailed evidence of execution from it.

Behavioral Indications

  • Behavioral - Execution (TA0002)

Analysis Value

  • Execution - Evidence of Execution
  • Execution - Last Executed
  • File - Path

Operating System Availability

  • Windows 11 (⚠️ Recent builds only)

Artifact Location(s)

  • %SystemRoot%\AppCompat\pca\PcaAppLaunchDic.txt

Artifact Interpretation - PcaAppLaunchDic.txt

This is a pipe-delimited text file that contains the following information:

{Executable Full Path}|{Most Recent Execution Timestamp}

The {Executable Full Path} provides the full path to the executable that was run.

The {Most Recent Execution Timestamp} execution timestamp is in UTC and represents the last time the specified executable was run.

Any executable format, such as .scr and .exe may be logged in this location. This artifact will also log executables run from file shares and USB devices.

Examples

\\NAS01-WS2K19\sysinternals\accesschk.exe|2023-05-03 01:55:27.884
C:\Users\user1.domain\Desktop\accesschk.exe|2023-05-03 01:56:00.799

This example was produced on Windows 11 Pro, Version 10.0.22621 Build 22621

Caveats

Based on testing on Windows 11 Pro Build 22621, it seems that executions from the command line are not logged to this artifact.