Hello Reader,
This is part 5 of a planned 24 part series. If you haven't read the prior parts I would highly recommend you do to understand how we got to this point!
Part 1 - Accessing an image and printing the partition table
Part 2 - Extracting a file from an image
Part 3 - Extracting a file from a live system
Part 4 - Turning a python script into a windows executable
Following this post the series continues:
Part 6 - Accessing an E01 image and extracting files
Part 7 - Taking in command line options with argparse to specify an image
Part 8 - Hashing a file stored in a forensic image
Part 9 - Recursively hashing all the files in an image
Part 10 - Recursively searching for files and extracting them from an image
Part 11 - Recursively searching for files and extracting them from a live system
Part 12 - Accessing different file systems
Part 13 - Accessing Volume Shadow Copies
In this post, before continuing on to accessing an E01 image which is a bit more complicated, let's make our lives a little bit easier. It's always a pain when you forget to open an administrative command prompt to run your script and in future posts when we get to GUIs its easy to forget to right click and run as administrator/sudo your script. So instead let's have our code do it for us. Now I can't take credit for this code like most good programmers I turn to Google for answers which most frequently will lead you to stackoverflow.com for answers. On stackoverflow I found a series of threads which offered solutions to the problem of elevating a python script and in testing I found the following thread to offer the best solution:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19672352/how-to-run-python-script-with-elevated-privilage-on-windows
So let's look at what changes we need to make our DFIR Wizard program to do this. By this I mean check to see if our script is running as administrator/root and if it's not then to try to do so (if the account has permissions to do so).
#!/usr/bin/python
# Sample program or step 3 in becoming a DFIR Wizard!
# No license as this code is simple and free!
import sys
import pytsk3
import datetime
import admin
if not admin.isUserAdmin():
admin.runAsAdmin()
sys.exit()
imagefile = "\\\\.\\PhysicalDrive0"
imagehandle = pytsk3.Img_Info(imagefile)
partitionTable = pytsk3.Volume_Info(imagehandle)
for partition in partitionTable:
print partition.addr, partition.desc, "%ss(%s)" % (partition.start, partition.start * 512), partition.len
if 'NTFS' in partition.desc:
filesystemObject = pytsk3.FS_Info(imagehandle, offset=(partition.start*512))
fileobject = filesystemObject.open("/$MFT")
print "File Inode:",fileobject.info.meta.addr
print "File Name:",fileobject.info.name.name
print "File Creation Time:",datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(fileobject.info.meta.crtime).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
outFileName = str(partition.addr)+fileobject.info.name.name
print outFileName
outfile = open(outFileName, 'w')
filedata = fileobject.read_random(0,fileobject.info.meta.size)
outfile.write(filedata)
outfile.close
I have bolded the parts of the code that I have changed. You can see the first thing we are doing is importing in a new class. In this case that class is called 'admin'. Now before you try to install admin with pip you should know that admin is actually an new python script we are going to create. Rather than embed the admin functions, which are quite lengthy, in our main script we are going to import the functions it provides and use them.
After importing the admin class we are doing a test using the 'if' conditional statement. We are testing the result of calling the admin class function 'isUserAdmin' for the negative. In other words our 'if' statement here returns 'true' that we are running as administrator then the script will not execute the next two lines of code and just continue on executing. However if the 'isUserAdmin' function comes back that the process is not currently running as the administrator then the 'not' applies before the function will make it return true and thus the two lines of code indented after the 'if' statement will execute.
So let's talk about those two files after the 'if' statement. The first line after the 'if' statement is calling the 'runAsAdmin' function provided from the admin class we imported. This function will start a new process of our python program as administrator for us and when it executes again as administrator our program will skip over this if statement and run the rest of our DFIR Wizard program. The next line tells our program that is not running as administrator to stop running as the rest of the script requires us to run as administrator to execute correctly. The sys library provides this 'exit' function that tells our program to quit and it will only quit after spawning off the new administrative version of our python script. That's all the modifications we are going to make to our main script, dfirwizard-v4.py.
Now, let's take a look at the new python script we are making called admin.py.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8; mode: python; py-indent-offset: 4; indent-tabs-mode: nil -*-
# vim: fileencoding=utf-8 tabstop=4 expandtab shiftwidth=4
# (C) COPYRIGHT © Preston Landers 2010
# Released under the same license as Python 2.6.5
import sys, os, traceback, types
def isUserAdmin():
if os.name == 'nt':
import ctypes
# WARNING: requires Windows XP SP2 or higher!
try:
return ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin()
except:
traceback.print_exc()
print "Admin check failed, assuming not an admin."
return False
elif os.name == 'posix':
# Check for root on Posix
return os.getuid() == 0
else:
raise RuntimeError, "Unsupported operating system for this module: %s" % (os.name,)
def runAsAdmin(cmdLine=None, wait=True):
if os.name != 'nt':
raise RuntimeError, "This function is only implemented on Windows."
import win32api, win32con, win32event, win32process
from win32com.shell.shell import ShellExecuteEx
from win32com.shell import shellcon
python_exe = sys.executable
if cmdLine is None:
cmdLine = [python_exe] + sys.argv
elif type(cmdLine) not in (types.TupleType,types.ListType):
raise ValueError, "cmdLine is not a sequence."
cmd = '"%s"' % (cmdLine[0],)
# XXX TODO: isn't there a function or something we can call to massage command line params?
params = " ".join(['"%s"' % (x,) for x in cmdLine[1:]])
cmdDir = ''
showCmd = win32con.SW_SHOWNORMAL
#showCmd = win32con.SW_HIDE
lpVerb = 'runas' # causes UAC elevation prompt.
# print "Running", cmd, params
# ShellExecute() doesn't seem to allow us to fetch the PID or handle
# of the process, so we can't get anything useful from it. Therefore
# the more complex ShellExecuteEx() must be used.
# procHandle = win32api.ShellExecute(0, lpVerb, cmd, params, cmdDir, showCmd)
procInfo = ShellExecuteEx(nShow=showCmd,
fMask=shellcon.SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS,
lpVerb=lpVerb,
lpFile=cmd,
lpParameters=params)
if wait:
procHandle = procInfo['hProcess']
obj = win32event.WaitForSingleObject(procHandle, win32event.INFINITE)
rc = win32process.GetExitCodeProcess(procHandle)
#print "Process handle %s returned code %s" % (procHandle, rc)
else:
rc = None
return rc
if __name__ == "__main__":
sys.exit(test())
Now there is a lot of code here to get through to understand whats going on here. Let's break it down in chunks:
import sys, os, traceback, types
Here we importing 4 libraries needed for the admin class to work; sys, os, traceback and types.
Next we are gong to define the first function the admin class provides, the 'isUserAdmin' function.
def isUserAdmin():
if os.name == 'nt':
import ctypes
# WARNING: requires Windows XP SP2 or higher!
try:
return ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin()
except:
traceback.print_exc()
print "Admin check failed, assuming not an admin."
return False
elif os.name == 'posix':
# Check for root on Posix
return os.getuid() == 0
else:
raise RuntimeError, "Unsupported operating system for this module: %s" % (os.name,)
The first thing we are doing is determining what operating system our program is running by checking the contents of the variable 'name' from the os library we imported in the first line. We are testing to see if the operating system name is defined as 'nt' which means windows. To see the full list of operating system name returned go here:
https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.name
If we are running under windows we are going to import another library for called 'ctypes' via the import ctypes line. The ctypes library is going to give us access to several windows internal functions, but it can do way more than that. These functions that we will call are made available from the windows api also called the win32 api its running to let programmers request information about the windows session they are currently running under. To learn more about the ctypes library go here:
https://docs.python.org/2/library/ctypes.html?highlight=ctypes#module-ctypes
Next we see a new python conditional called 'try' and 'except'. This will allow us to to attempt to execute a function and in the event that it returns a failure we can define how to handle the error. Our try line is calling the following function ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin(), for more information about this win32 api function go here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776463%28v=vs.85%29.aspx. Look at what we are doing with the ctypes library to call this function. We are using ctypes to call the win32 api through windll which is then calling shell32 to call the IsUserAnAdmin function. Using this syntax we can call any other shell32 function of which their are many! For a much longer read on the shell32 library go here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb773177(v=vs.85).aspx
Now if we are running as administrator our code will return true. If we are not then the except clause will be called and we will print to the console that we are not running as administrator and then return false. The next elif or 'else if' will check to see if we are running on a 'posix' operating system. Posix should return for most unix operating systems such as BSD, OSX and Linux. If we are running under a Posix operating system we will check to see if we are running as root or uid 0 and then return truse or false. Otherwise we have an 'else' operator at the end stating we don't know how to handle any non windows non posix operating system.
We are now done with this function! Let's move on to the next function
def runAsAdmin(cmdLine=None, wait=True):
if os.name != 'nt':
raise RuntimeError, "This function is only implemented on Windows."
import win32api, win32con, win32event, win32process
from win32com.shell.shell import ShellExecuteEx
from win32com.shell import shellcon
python_exe = sys.executable
if cmdLine is None:
cmdLine = [python_exe] + sys.argv
elif type(cmdLine) not in (types.TupleType,types.ListType):
raise ValueError, "cmdLine is not a sequence."
cmd = '"%s"' % (cmdLine[0],)
# XXX TODO: isn't there a function or something we can call to massage command line params?
params = " ".join(['"%s"' % (x,) for x in cmdLine[1:]])
cmdDir = ''
showCmd = win32con.SW_SHOWNORMAL
#showCmd = win32con.SW_HIDE
lpVerb = 'runas' # causes UAC elevation prompt.
# print "Running", cmd, params
# ShellExecute() doesn't seem to allow us to fetch the PID or handle
# of the process, so we can't get anything useful from it. Therefore
# the more complex ShellExecuteEx() must be used.
# procHandle = win32api.ShellExecute(0, lpVerb, cmd, params, cmdDir, showCmd)
procInfo = ShellExecuteEx(nShow=showCmd,
fMask=shellcon.SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS,
lpVerb=lpVerb,
lpFile=cmd,
lpParameters=params)
if wait:
procHandle = procInfo['hProcess']
obj = win32event.WaitForSingleObject(procHandle, win32event.INFINITE)
rc = win32process.GetExitCodeProcess(procHandle)
#print "Process handle %s returned code %s" % (procHandle, rc)
else:
rc = None
return rc
This is not a short function so let's break it down in chunks again. Our function is being defined here with two variables; cmdLine and wait. These two variables are being given default values in case no value was passed in. In other words if we called this function with a specific cmdLine variable then the function would accept it, otherwise if no such variable is passed in (as we are doing in our program) then it will use the default value of None. Next we make sure that we are running under Windows as this function won't work on another operating system as its currently written. We do this with a check to os.name again with the condition != or not equals. If our operating system is not windows (returned as nt here) then the function will raise an error stating it won't work!
Next we need import more libraries! We are importing win32api, win32con, win32event, win32process libraries in order to start this up. From these libraries we are importing two functions into our local namespace. Importing into our local namespace means we don't have to call it with the full library path, instead we can call it by function name alone. We bringing in ShellExecuteEx and shellcon into our local namespace.
Now its time to figure out what python instance we are going to run as administrator with the following line, python_exe = sys.executable. We are assigning the name of the currently running python interpreter we are using from sys.executable to the variable python_exe.
Let's look at the next chunk of code:
if cmdLine is None:
cmdLine = [python_exe] + sys.argv
elif type(cmdLine) not in (types.TupleType,types.ListType):
raise ValueError, "cmdLine is not a sequence."
cmd = '"%s"' % (cmdLine[0],)
If we didn't pass in a value to cmdLine and its default value of 'None' is applied than we will update the cmdLine variable to be the name of our executable that we capture prior and the command line arguments passed into our currently running script via the sys provided variable argv.
If our cmdLine variable contains a value we passed in but it is not a list (a series of values in an array) then we throw an error. Lastly if neither applies, meaning a value was supplied and it is a list type variable then we assign it to our cmd to execute.
This is followed by:
params = " ".join(['"%s"' % (x,) for x in cmdLine[1:]])
cmdDir = ''
Where we are joining all the command line arguments into a variable called params and defining the directory we want our program to run in to be the directory our program is currently running from.
Next we set the option of whether to show the console window of the running application. If this was a GUI program we would want to hide this, but since this is currently a command line program we want to show it. We are using the win32con library constants SW_SHOWNORMAL and SW_HIDE to set that value which will be pass into the administrative process we create.
showCmd = win32con.SW_SHOWNORMAL
#showCmd = win32con.SW_HIDE
Next we need to make sure we set the right flag for an elevated process if we are in a UAC aware environment: lpVerb = 'runas' # causes UAC elevation prompt. by setting the lpVerb variable equal to runas.
Now we are ready to create our administrative process using the ShellExecuteEx command and passing in all the variables we set in the lines prior. We store the resulting process id in a variable named procInfo. We are passing one additional constant value here from shellcon, SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS to make sure our parent process does not exit here.
procInfo = ShellExecuteEx(nShow=showCmd,
fMask=shellcon.SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS,
lpVerb=lpVerb,
lpFile=cmd,
lpParameters=params)
For more information on the ShellExecuteEx function go here:
http://www.pinvoke.net/default.aspx/shell32/ShellExecuteEx.html
Lastly we need to check if we passed in a wait flag (true or false)
if wait:
procHandle = procInfo['hProcess']
obj = win32event.WaitForSingleObject(procHandle, win32event.INFINITE)
rc = win32process.GetExitCodeProcess(procHandle)
#print "Process handle %s returned code %s" % (procHandle, rc)
else:
rc = None
return rc
If wait is true, which is by default, then we will wait for our administrative execution to finish and then we set the variable rc to exit code of the administrative process. If we are not waiting to get the return state then we set rc to the value None. Lastly we return the value of the variable rc to the program that called this function to begin with.
Lastly we have a default constructor
if __name__ == "__main__":
sys.exit(test())
That was a lot to get through! But now that we have it we can reuse it every time we want to make sure our executable runs as administrator rather than having to restart it manually ourselves. If you notice in my code I put an exit after the administrative process returns, this is because if we let our script continue to run in the original non administrative process it will throw an error and likely just confuse the user.
If you want to grab these two files do it from the series github:
dfirwizard-v4.py:
https://github.com/dlcowen/dfirwizard/blob/master/dfirwizard-v4.py
admin.py:
https://github.com/dlcowen/dfirwizard/blob/master/admin.py
In the next part we will access an E01 image!
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