flow.record

A library for defining and creating structured data (called records) that can be streamed to disk or piped to other tools that use flow.record.

Records can be read and transformed to other formats by using output adapters, such as CSV and JSON.

For more information on how Dissect uses this library, please see the documentation.

Requirements

This project is part of the Dissect framework and requires Python.

Information on the supported Python versions can be found in the Getting Started section of the documentation.

Installation

flow.record is available on PyPI.

pip install flow.record

Usage

This library contains the tool rdump. With rdump you can read, write, interact, and manipulate records from stdin or from record files saved on disk. Please refer to rdump -h or to the rdump documentation for all parameters.

Records are the primary output type when using the various functions of target-query. The following command shows how to pipe record output from target-query to rdump:

user@dissect~$ target-query -f runkeys targets/EXAMPLE.vmx | rdump
<windows/registry/run hostname='EXAMPLE' domain='EXAMPLE.local' ts=2022-12-09 12:06:20.037806+00:00 name='OneDriveSetup' path='C:/Windows/SysWOW64/OneDriveSetup.exe /thfirstsetup' key='HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run' hive_filepath='C:\\Windows/ServiceProfiles/LocalService/ntuser.dat' username='LocalService' user_sid='S-1-5-19' user_home='%systemroot%\\ServiceProfiles\\LocalService'>
<...>

Programming example

Define a RecordDescriptor (schema) and then create a few records and write them to disk

from flow.record import RecordDescriptor, RecordWriter

# define our descriptor
MyRecord = RecordDescriptor("my/record", [
    ("net.ipaddress", "ip"),
    ("string", "description"),
])

# define some records
records = [
    MyRecord("1.1.1.1", "cloudflare dns"),
    MyRecord("8.8.8.8", "google dns"),
]

# write the records to disk
with RecordWriter("output.records.gz") as writer:
    for record in records:
        writer.write(record)

The records can then be read from disk using the rdump tool or by instantiating a RecordReader when using the library.

$ rdump output.records.gz
<my/record ip=net.ipaddress('1.1.1.1') description='cloudflare dns'>
<my/record ip=net.ipaddress('8.8.8.8') description='google dns'>

Selectors

We can also use selectors for filtering and selecting records using a query (Python like syntax), e.g.:

$ rdump output.records.gz -s '"google" in r.description'
<my/record ip=net.ipaddress('8.8.8.8') description='google dns'>

$ rdump output.records.gz -s 'r.ip in net.ipnetwork("1.1.0.0/16")'
<my/record ip=net.ipaddress('1.1.1.1') description='cloudflare dns'>

Build and test instructions

This project uses tox to build source and wheel distributions. Run the following command from the root folder to build these:

tox -e build

The build artifacts can be found in the dist/ directory.

tox is also used to run linting and unit tests in a self-contained environment. To run both linting and unit tests using the default installed Python version, run:

tox

For a more elaborate explanation on how to build and test the project, please see the documentation.

Contributing

The Dissect project encourages any contribution to the codebase. To make your contribution fit into the project, please refer to the development guide.