Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Book Image

Mastering Python Forensics

Overview of this book

Digital forensic analysis is the process of examining and extracting data digitally and examining it. Python has the combination of power, expressiveness, and ease of use that makes it an essential complementary tool to the traditional, off-the-shelf digital forensic tools. This book will teach you how to perform forensic analysis and investigations by exploring the capabilities of various Python libraries. The book starts by explaining the building blocks of the Python programming language, especially ctypes in-depth, along with how to automate typical tasks in file system analysis, common correlation tasks to discover anomalies, as well as templates for investigations. Next, we’ll show you cryptographic algorithms that can be used during forensic investigations to check for known files or to compare suspicious files with online services such as VirusTotal or Mobile-Sandbox. Moving on, you’ll learn how to sniff on the network, generate and analyze network flows, and perform log correlation with the help of Python scripts and tools. You’ll get to know about the concepts of virtualization and how virtualization influences IT forensics, and you’ll discover how to perform forensic analysis of a jailbroken/rooted mobile device that is based on iOS or Android. Finally, the book teaches you how to analyze volatile memory and search for known malware samples based on YARA rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 4. Using Python for Network Forensics

In this chapter, we will focus on the parts of the forensic investigation that are specific to the network layer. We will choose one of the most widely used Python packages for the purpose of manipulating and analyzing network traffic (Scapy) as well as a newly released open source framework by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (Dshell). For both the toolkits, we have selected the examples of interesting evidence. This chapter will teach you the following:

  • How to search for IOC in network traffic

  • How to extract files for further analysis

  • How to monitor accessed files through Server Message Block (SMB)

  • How to build your own port scanner