scripts
Just a quick script update!
New with 10.13 High Sierra are the newer format *.sfl2 Mac MRU files. The format changes slightly from the older *.sfl files found in 10.11 and 10.12. It also uses the analyst infuriating NSKeyedArchiver format. An example of the Recent Applications MRU can be seen below.
The updated script can be found here.
I've updated my macMRU.py script to parse the Spotlight Shortcuts plist file that I consider to be very MRU-like. This plist file contains what the user typed into the Spotlight search window, what they clicked on, and when this all occurred. You can find artifacts of application usage, documents, emails, photos, etc.
The second part of the update (and probably the most requested!) was to add in arguments to allow the analyst to see the parse out the Bookmark and Alias BLOB data. Previously the script only had an option to show the BLOB hexdump. Using mac_alias [download here], the script can now parse these BLOBs. This comes with a caveat, this script relies on the documented structures by others (with a few minor changes by my own research). These have not been officially documented by Apple therefore YMMV. Many of us are still researching these, hopefully this script will help the process! This update provides three new arguments:
I want to say thank you to a few folks that allowed these additions to be made:
Yep, you read that right - Mac Location Scraper! I've updated my 'iOS Location Scraper' script to be compatible with the same location database found on iOS - the cache_encryptedA.db (and lockCache_encryptedA.db) that are now found on macOS at least as far back as 10.8.
On macOS these databases hold similar Wi-Fi location data. I have found these databases to be located in the /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n00000sm00006d/C/ directory. It appears to store about last seven days worth of Wi-Fi related data.
I have also updated the script to support the newer 'routined' CoreRoutine.sqlite database on iOS 10. This database does tend to get stored with a *.shm/*.wal database files so I would recommend pulling off all the files and consolidating them into the main database *.sqlite file, otherwise all the data will not be extracted.
You can get the script here!
I've updated my MacMRU parser script, located here: https://github.com/mac4n6/macMRU-Parser.
This update includes support for 'Most Recently Used' artifacts for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and 2016. I've also added a bit more error checking, so please let me know if you come across a plist that doesn't work or does not contain certain expected keys. It happens, I've run across a few myself - I can't explain why now, but I hope to look into it further.
While researching for this update I noticed something interesting. Microsoft Office used a binary plist format for the 2011 version of the software, but "downgraded" to an XML-based plist format in the 2016 version. Most of the time I see plists headed in the XML->Binary direction.
Got a MacMRU file that I don't parse? Please let me know!
I hope you find this script useful!
I have been studying the new SFL-based MRU plist files found in OS X 10.11. They make analysis hard because they are binary plist files using the NSKeyedArchiver format – see here for my manual analysis of these files. I’ve also included the ‘older’ format plist files used in OS X 10.10 and older.
In order to analyze them better (and student requests) I wrote a Python script to output the contents of these files in an easier to read format. Nothing fancy, just text printed to standard output.
Get the script here from my Github page. I hope you find the script useful!
The script is meant to be run on a directory; this can be a directory of extracted plist files from an image, a directory on your own system (ie: ~/Library), or from a mounted image (ie: /Volumes/mounted_image_file/Users/<username>/), you get the idea.
This script parses the following plist files:
The script usage is below. The only required argument is the directory, but the output can include binary BLOB hex dump of the Bookmark data (--blob). Most of the Mac MRUs contain a binary Bookmark BLOB of data that can be useful to determine where a certain file was located or where an application was run from. I’ve included it as an option as it can get very, very verbose.
The script also has two dependencies, hexdump.py and ccl_bplist.py. These files can be installed or just simply placed in the same directory you are running the macMRU.py script from. (Installation on OS X 10.11 systems are limited thanks to SIP.)
A few screenshots of example script output:
This example shows the output without the BLOB data of the newer SFL-based MRU files:
This example shows the same output with a sample of the hexdump BLOB data, you can see where this can get quite verbose.
The last example shows the ‘older’ MRU plist files found on 10.10 and older systems. (The com.apple.finder.plist files is the same on 10.11.)
