Automating DFIR - How to series on programming libtsk with python Part 7

Automating DFIR - How to series on programming libtsk with python Part 7



Hello Reader,
           We've reached the seventh part of our series and we are starting to ramp up on our dfir wizardry! If you are just starting here, don't. Please start at Part 1 unless you already have a lot of experience both with Python AND with pytsk/pyewf.

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
Part 5 - Auto escalating your python script to administrator
Part 6 - Accessing an E01 image and extracting files

Following this post the series continues:

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  

When last I left you we extracted files from an E01 image. This is great but our script is still hard coding in the name of the image to access, so it's time to to start adding command line arguments and parsing to start making our DFIR Wizard program more flexible. Python makes this easy with a standard library named 'argparse' which not only will allow us to handle advanced command line arguments but it will also make usage instructions for us. If you want to read the documentation on argparse go here: https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/argparse.html

We start by importing the argparse library, importing libraries is something you should be very familiar with by now.

import argparse

Next we need to create an argparse object by calling the ArgumentParser function, providing a description of what our program does and then storing the result in a variable named argparser. The description of our program we place into the description parameter we pass in will be used in the auto-generation of help and usage instructions. The more you put, the more the user knows. In the end the argparse object creation will look like this:

argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Extract the $MFT from all of the NTFS partitions of an E01')

For every argument we want to pass in from the command line and handle we need to use the add_argument function that we invoke from our argparser object. There are a lot of options you can choose from when you use add_argument and we are going to take advantage of a couple of them. See below for how this will look and then we will go into what the parameters mean:

argparser.add_argument( '-i', '--image', dest='imagefile', action="store", type=str, default=None, required=True, help='E01 to extract from' )
The first thing you specify if what, if any, option you want to identify this argument as. For our script we are defining this argument to be set if the user passes in -i or the long form --image. Next we need to tell add_argument what variable to store the parsed argument into, we are going to put it into a variable named imagefile. Next we need to tell the parser what to do with data passed to this argument, in this case we want to store it. Next we need tell the parser what type of variable we want to store this as, in this case we want to store it as a string. Next we can set a default value if we would like, but we don't have a default value for our forensic image file name. The next argument is important as we specify if an argument is required for the program to continue executing. If you don't provide a required argument then the program will print the usage instructions for the program, generated by argparse, and then quit. The last option we are specifying here is the help option which will print whatever description we put here in the usage information.
Now that we have defined our argument we have to tell argparse to parse the arguments that have been passed in by calling the parse_args function from our argparser object and then assign the object it returns of parsed arguments to a variable. In our program we have called that variable args and we will use it to access any arguments parsed.
args = argparser.parse_args()
One more change and we are done, we need to change our code to remove the harcoded image name and replace it with args.imagefile which contains the name of the image the user specified with -i or --image.
filenames = pyewf.glob(args.imagefile)
That's it! We can specify at execution what E01 image file we want to extract the $MFT from.
 The final program looks like this: 
#!/usr/bin/python # Sample program or step 6 in becoming a DFIR Wizard! # No license as this code is simple and free! import sys import pytsk3 import datetime import pyewf import argparse class ewf_Img_Info(pytsk3.Img_Info): def __init__(self, ewf_handle): self._ewf_handle = ewf_handle super(ewf_Img_Info, self).__init__( url="", type=pytsk3.TSK_IMG_TYPE_EXTERNAL) def close(self): self._ewf_handle.close() def read(self, offset, size): self._ewf_handle.seek(offset) return self._ewf_handle.read(size) def get_size(self): return self._ewf_handle.get_media_size() argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser

 

(description='Extract the $MFT from all of the NTFS partitions of an E01') argparser.add_argument( '-i', '--image', dest='imagefile', action="store", type=str, default=None, required=True, help='E01 to extract from' ) args = argparser.parse_args() filenames = pyewf.glob(args.imagefile) ewf_handle = pyewf.handle() ewf_handle.open(filenames) imagehandle = ewf_Img_Info(ewf_handle) 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
The final program can be downloaded from out series Github here: https://github.com/dlcowen/dfirwizard/blob/master/dfirwizard-v6.py

In future posts we'll change our program so that the user can specify a live disk, raw image or other image types but one step at a time. In part 8 we will start hashing files, which is something all of us have to do at one time or another. 

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