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

Additional challenges


For this chapter, we propose adding support for the Windows XP format of the setupapi.log. The user can supply a switch at the command line to indicate which type of log will be processed. For a more difficult task, our script could automatically identify the type of log file by fingerprinting unique structures found only in Windows XP versus the Windows 7 version.

Improving the deduplication process we used would be a welcomed addition. As we identified, some entries have UID values embedded in the device entry. This value is generally assigned by the manufacturer and could be used to deduplicate the entries. As you may note in the output, the UID can contain extra ampersand characters that may or may not be crucial to the UID structure. By applying some simple logic, possibly in a new function, we can improve deduplication based on UIDs.