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

Our second iteration – setupapi_parser.v2.py


With a functioning prototype, we now have some cleanup work to do. The first iteration was a proof of concept to illustrate how a setupapi.dev.log file can be parsed for forensic artifacts. With our second revision, we will clean up the code and make it so that it will be easier to use in the future by rearranging the code. In addition, we will integrate a more robust command-line interface, validate any user-supplied inputs, improve processing efficiency, and better display results.

On lines 1 through 3, we import libraries that we will need for these improvements. Argparse is a library we discussed at length in Chapter 2, Python Fundamentals, and is used to implement and structure arguments from the user. Next, we import os, a library we will use in this script to check the existence of input files before continuing. This will prevent us from trying to process a file that does not exist. The os module is used to access common operating system...