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

Exploring the framework – framework.py


Our framework will take some input directory, recursively index all of its files, run a series of plugins, and then write a series of reports into a specified output directory. The idea is that the examiner could mount a .E01 or .dd file using FTK Imager or a similar tool and then run the framework against the mounted directory.

The layout of a framework is an important first step in achieving a simplistic design. We recommend placing writers and plugins in appropriately labeled subdirectories under the framework controller. Our framework is laid out in the following manner:

  |-- framework.py
  |-- requirements.txt
  |-- plugins
      |-- __init__.py
      |-- exif.py
      |-- id3.py
      |-- office.py
      |-- pst_indexer.py
      |-- setupapi.py
      |-- userassist.py
      |-- wal_crawler.py
      |-- helper
          |-- __init__.py
          |-- utility.py
          |-- usb_lookup.py
  |-- writers
      |-- __init__.py
      |-- csv_writer.py...