Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By : Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller
Book Image

Python Digital Forensics Cookbook

By: Chapin Bryce, Preston Miller

Overview of this book

Technology plays an increasingly large role in our daily lives and shows no sign of stopping. Now, more than ever, it is paramount that an investigator develops programming expertise to deal with increasingly large datasets. By leveraging the Python recipes explored throughout this book, we make the complex simple, quickly extracting relevant information from large datasets. You will explore, develop, and deploy Python code and libraries to provide meaningful results that can be immediately applied to your investigations. Throughout the Python Digital Forensics Cookbook, recipes include topics such as working with forensic evidence containers, parsing mobile and desktop operating system artifacts, extracting embedded metadata from documents and executables, and identifying indicators of compromise. You will also learn to integrate scripts with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) such as VirusTotal and PassiveTotal, and tools such as Axiom, Cellebrite, and EnCase. By the end of the book, you will have a sound understanding of Python and how you can use it to process artifacts in your investigations.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Parsing PLIST files

Recipe Difficulty: Easy

Python Version: 2.7 or 3.5

Operating System: Any

This recipe will process the Info.plist file present in every iOS backup and extract device-specific information such as the device name, IMEI, serial number, product make, model, and iOS version, and the last backup date. Property lists, or PLISTs, come in two different formats: XML or binary. Typically, when dealing with binary PLISTs, one will need to use the plutil utility on a macOS platform to convert it to a readable XML format. However, we will introduce a Python library that handles both types readily and easily. Once we extract the relevant data elements from the Info.plist file, we will print this data to the console.

Getting started

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