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

Creating frameworks in Python


Frameworks are incredibly useful for large-scale projects in Python. We previously called the UserAssist script a framework in Chapter 6, Extracting Artifacts from Binary Files; however, it does not really fit that model. The frameworks we build will have an abstract top layer, which will act as the controller of the program. This controller will be responsible for executing plugins and writers.

A plugin is code contained in a separate script that adds a specific feature to the framework. Once developed, a plugin should be easily integrated into an existing framework in a few lines of code. A plugin should also execute standalone functionality and not require modification of the controller to operate. For example, we will write one plugin to specifically process EXIF metadata and another to process Office Metadata. An advantage of the framework model is that it allows us to group many plugins together in an organized manner and execute them all for a shared objective...