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

Working with the Registry module


The Registry module, developed by Willi Ballenthin, can be used to obtain keys and values from registry hives. Python provides a built-in registry module named _winreg; however, this module only works on Windows machines. The _winreg module interacts with the registry on the system running the module. It does not support opening external registry hives.

The Registry module allows us to interact with supplied registry hives and can be run on non-Windows machines. The Registry module can be downloaded from https://github.com/williballenthin/python-registry. Click on the releases section to see a list of all stable versions and download version 1.1.0. For this chapter, we use version 1.1.0. Once the archived file is downloaded and extracted, we can run the included setup.py file to install the module. In a command prompt, execute the following code in the module's top-level directory:

python setup.py install

This should install the Registry module successfully...