Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By : Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By: Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

This book will illustrate how and why you should learn Python to strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. The tutorials use an interactive design, giving you experience of the development process so you gain a better understanding of what it means to be a forensic developer. Each chapter walks you through a forensic artifact and one or more methods to analyze the evidence. It also provides reasons why one method may be advantageous over another. We cover common digital forensics and incident response scenarios, with scripts that can be used to tackle case work in the field. Using built-in and community-sourced libraries, you will improve your problem solving skills with the addition of the Python scripting language. In addition, we provide resources for further exploration of each script so you can understand what further purposes Python can serve. With this knowledge, you can rapidly develop and deploy solutions to identify critical information and fine-tune your skill set as an examiner.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning Python for Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

SQLite WAL files


When analyzing SQLite databases, the examiner might come across additional temporary files. There are nine types of temporary SQLite files:

  • Rollback, Master, and Statement journals

  • WALs

  • Shared-memory files

  • TEMP databases

  • Views and subqueries materializations

  • Transient indices and databases

For more details on these files, refer to https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html, which describes these files in greater detail. WAL is one of those temporary files and is involved in the atomic commit and rollback scenarios. Only databases that have set their journaling mode to WAL will use the write ahead log method. The following code is required to setup the database to use WAL journaling.

PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;

The WAL file is created in the same directory as the SQLite database with "-wal" appended to the original SQLite database filename. When a connection is made to the SQLite database, a WAL file is temporarily created. This WAL file will contain any changes made to the database while...