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)

Mining for PDF metadata

Recipe Difficulty: Easy

Python Version: 2.7 or 3.5

Operating System: Any

While PDF documents can represent a wide variety of media, including images, text, and forms, they contain structured embedded metadata in the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) format that can provide us with some additional information. Through this recipe, we access a PDF using Python and extract metadata describing the creation and lineage of the document.

Getting started

This recipe requires the installation of the third-party library PyPDF2. All other libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. The PyPDF2 module provides us with bindings to read and write PDF files. In our case, we will only...