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)

Handling SQLite databases

Recipe Difficulty: Easy

Python Version: 3.5

Operating System: Any

As discussed, SQLite databases serve as the primary data repository on mobile devices. Python has a built-in library, sqlite3, which can be used to interface with these databases. In this script, we will interact with the iPhone sms.db file and extract data from the message table. We will also use this script as an opportunity to introduce the csv library and write the message data to a spreadsheet.

To learn more about the sqlite3 library, visit https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html.

Getting started

All libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. For this script, make sure to have an sms.db...