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

Parsing Office metadata – office_parser.py


The last of the plugins, office_parser.py, parses DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files, extracting embedded metadata in XML files. We use the zipfile module, which is part of the standard library, to unzip and access the contents of the Office document. This script has two functions: officeParser() and getTags().

001 import zipfile
002 import os
003 from time import gmtime, strftime
004  
005 from lxml import etree
006 import processors
007  
008 __author__ = 'Preston Miller & Chapin Bryce'
009 __date__ = '20160401'
010 __version__ = 0.01
011 __description__ = 'This scripts parses embedded metadata from office files'
012  
013 def officeParser():
...
028 def getTags():

Evaluating the officeParser() function

The officeParser() function first checks the input file against the known file signature. All Office documents share the same file signature, 0x504b030414000600, and if the input file matches, it is then further processed by the getTags() function, as...