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 our first forensic script – usb_lookup.py


Now that we've gotten our feet wet writing our first Python script, let's write our first forensic script. During forensic investigations, it is not uncommon to see references to external devices by their vendor ID (VID) and product ID (PID) values; these values are represented by four hexadecimal characters. In cases where the vendor and product name are not identified, the examiner must look up this information. One such location for this information is the webpage http://linux-usb.org/usb.ids. For example, on this webpage, we can see that a Canon EOS Digital Rebel has a vendor ID of 0x04A9 and a product ID of 0x3084. We will use this data source when attempting to identify the vendor and product names, using the defined identifiers.

First, let's look at the data source we're going to be parsing. A hypothetical sample illustrating the structure of our data source is mentioned later. There are USB vendors and for each vendor, a set of...