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

Developing the Date Decoder GUI – date_decoder.py


With the introduction to timestamps, GUI development, and Python classes, let's begin developing our date_decoder.py script. We will design a GUI with two primary functionalities that the end user will interact with. First, it allows the user to enter a timestamp from an artifact in native format and convert it to a human-readable time. The second feature allows the user to enter a human-readable timestamp and select an option to convert it into the respective machine times. To build this, we will use an entry box, several labels, and different types of buttons for the user to interact with the interface.

Note

All dates processed with this code assume local machine time for the time zone. Please ensure to convert all timestamp sources into a uniform time zone to simplify the analysis.

As our other scripts, this code starts with our import statements followed by authorship details. On lines 1 and 2, we import the Tkinter and theme resources modules...