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)

Reading office document metadata

Recipe Difficulty: Medium

Python Version: 2.7 or 3.5

Operating System: Any

Reading metadata from office documents can expose interesting information about the authorship and history of those files. Conveniently, the 2007 formatted .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files store metadata in XML. The XML tags can be easily processed with Python.

Getting started

All libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. We use the built-in xml library and the zipfile library to allow us access to the XML documents within the ZIP container.

To learn more about the xml library, visit https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html.
To Learn more about the zipfile library,...