Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Overview of this book

Digital forensic analysis is the process of examining and extracting data digitally and examining it. Python has the combination of power, expressiveness, and ease of use that makes it an essential complementary tool to the traditional, off-the-shelf digital forensic tools. This book will teach you how to perform forensic analysis and investigations by exploring the capabilities of various Python libraries. The book starts by explaining the building blocks of the Python programming language, especially ctypes in-depth, along with how to automate typical tasks in file system analysis, common correlation tasks to discover anomalies, as well as templates for investigations. Next, we’ll show you cryptographic algorithms that can be used during forensic investigations to check for known files or to compare suspicious files with online services such as VirusTotal or Mobile-Sandbox. Moving on, you’ll learn how to sniff on the network, generate and analyze network flows, and perform log correlation with the help of Python scripts and tools. You’ll get to know about the concepts of virtualization and how virtualization influences IT forensics, and you’ll discover how to perform forensic analysis of a jailbroken/rooted mobile device that is based on iOS or Android. Finally, the book teaches you how to analyze volatile memory and search for known malware samples based on YARA rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Apple iOS


After we have seen how to examine an Android-based smartphone, we now want to show you how to perform similar investigations on iOS-based devices. In the first section, we are using a Secure Shell (SSH) connection to the device and will show you how to get stored data from the keychain of a jailbroken iOS device.

In the second part of this section, we will use libimobiledevice. This library is a cross-platform library that uses the protocols to support iOS-based devices and allows you to easily access the device's filesystem, retrieve information about the device and it's internals, backup/restore the device, manage installed applications, retrieve PIM data as well as bookmarks, and so on. The most important fact is that the iOS-based device does not have to be jailbroken in order to be used— when dealing with libimobiledevice.

Getting the Keychain from a jailbroken iDevice

In many cases, it can be very helpful to get usernames and passwords of accounts that the user of the iDevice...