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

Designing our script


The first iteration of our script focuses on performing the task at hand with a standard module, sqlite3, in a more manual fashion. This entails writing out each SQL statement and executing them as if you were working with the database itself. Although this is not a very Pythonic manner of handling a database, it demonstrates the methods used to interact with a database with Python. Our second iteration employs two third-party libraries: peewee and jinja2.

Peewee is an object-relational mapper (ORM), which is a term used to describe a software suite that uses objects to handle database operations. In short, this ORM allows the developer to call functions and define classes in Python, which interprets them into database commands. Peewee is a light ORM, as it is a single Python file that supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Sqlite3 database connections. Because the framework API is uniform across the database types, few modifications are required to change the database backend...