Generates aggregate reports of files in a directory or disk image based on input from Richard Lehane's Siegfried.
For the graphical user interface (GUI) version of Brunnhilde, see Brunnhilde GUI.
Brunnhilde runs Siegfried against a specified directory or disk image, loads the results into a sqlite3 database, and queries the database to generate reports to aid in triage, arrangement, and description of digital archives. The program will also check for viruses unless specified otherwise, and will optionally run bulk_extractor against the given source. Outputs include:
report.html: Includes some provenance information on the scan itself, aggregate statistics for the material as a whole (number of files, begin and end dates, number of unique vs. duplicate files, etc.), and detailed reports on content found (file formats, file format versions, MIME types, last modified dates by year, unidentified files, Siegfried warnings/errors, duplicate files, and -optionally - Social Security Numbers found by bulk_extractor).csv_reportsfolder: Contains CSV results queried from database on file formats, file format versions, MIME types, last modified dates by year, unidentified files, Siegfried warnings and errors, and duplicate files.siegfried.csv: Full CSV output from Siegfried
Optionally, outputs may also include:
tree.txt: Tree report of the directory structure of directory or file system on disk image (in Linux and macOS only)bulk_extractorfolder: Contains bulk_extractor outputs (if selected).carved_filesfolder: Contains files carved from disk images by tsk_recover or HFS Explorer (generated in-dmode; can be deleted at end of process by passing the-ror--removefilesflag to Brunnhilde).dfxml.xml: A fiwalk-generated Digital Forensics XML file describing the volumes, filesystems, and files on a disk (generated in -d mode for non-HFS disk images).logsfolder: Contains log files for ClamAV and bulk_extractor (if selected).siegfried.sqlite: SQLite3 database generated from Siegfried CSV (deleted at end of processing by default, but may be retained by using the-kflag.)
All outputs are placed into a new directory named after the identifier passed to Brunnhilde as the last argument.
For the most accurate statistics with Siegfried 1.6+, it is advised to force Siegfried to make single identifications for files with multiple filetypes. This can be accomplished with roy using the following command:
roy build -multi 0
For a more detailed explanation of how multiple identifications are handled by Siegfried, see richardlehane/siegfried#75.
Brunnhilde and all of its dependencies are already installed in BitCurator version 1.7.106+. In versions 1.8.0+, a terminal launcher for Brunnhilde is included in the "Forensics and Reporting" folder on the BitCurator desktop.
Brunnhilde minimally requires that Python 2 or 3 and Siegfried are installed on your system to characterize directories of content. Characterizing disk images introduces additional dependencies. For more information, see Dependencies.
sudo pip install brunnhilde
If using macOS, you may have to run sudo pip3 install brunnhilde
Once installed, you can call brunnhilde with just brunnhilde.py [arguments].
If an older version of Brunnhilde is installed on your system, you can upgrade to the latest version with:
sudo pip install brunnhilde --upgrade
usage: brunnhilde.py [-h] [-a] [-b] [--ssn_mode SSN_MODE] [--regex REGEX] [-d]
[--hfs] [--hfs_resforks] [--hfs_partition HFS_PARTITION]
[--hfs_fsroot HFS_FSROOT] [--tsk_imgtype TSK_IMGTYPE]
[--tsk_fstype TSK_FSTYPE]
[--tsk_sector_offset TSK_SECTOR_OFFSET] [--hash HASH]
[-k] [-l] [-n] [-r] [-t] [-v] [-V] [-w] [-z]
[--save_assets SAVE_ASSETS] [--load_assets LOAD_ASSETS]
[--csv CSV] [--stdin] [-o] [--in-memory-db]
source destination [basename]
positional arguments:
source Path to source directory or disk image
destination Path to destination for reports
basename DEPRECATED. Accession number or identifier, used as
basename for outputs. Prefer using the new simpler
`brunnhilde.py source destination` syntax. The
basename argument is retained for API stability and
used when provided.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-a, --allocated Instruct tsk_recover to export only allocated files
(recovers all files by default)
-b, --bulkextractor Run Bulk Extractor on source
--ssn_mode SSN_MODE Specify ssn_mode for Bulk Extractor (0, 1, or 2)
--regex REGEX Specify path to regex file
-d, --diskimage Use disk image instead of dir as input (Linux and
macOS only)
--hfs Use for raw disk images of HFS disks
--hfs_resforks, --resforks
HFS option: Extract AppleDouble resource forks from
HFS disks
--hfs_partition HFS_PARTITION
HFS option: Specify partition number as integer for
unhfs to extract (e.g. --hfs_partition 1)
--hfs_fsroot HFS_FSROOT
HFS option: Specify POSIX path (file or dir) in the
HFS file system for unhfs to extract (e.g.
--hfs_fsroot /Users/tessa/backup/)
--tsk_imgtype TSK_IMGTYPE
TSK option: Specify format of image type for
tsk_recover. See tsk_recover man page for details
--tsk_fstype TSK_FSTYPE
TSK option: Specify file system type for tsk_recover.
See tsk_recover man page for details
--tsk_sector_offset TSK_SECTOR_OFFSET
TSK option: Sector offset for particular volume for
tsk_recover to recover
--hash HASH Specify hash algorithm
-k, --keepsqlite Retain Brunnhilde-generated sqlite db after processing
-l, --largefiles Enable virus scanning of large files
-n, --noclam Skip ClamAV virus scan
-r, --removefiles Delete 'carved_files' directory when done (disk image
input only)
-t, --throttle Pause for 1s between Siegfried scans
-v, --verbosesf Log verbose Siegfried output to terminal while
processing
-V, --version Display Brunnhilde version
-w, --warnings, --showwarnings
Add Siegfried warnings to HTML report
-z, --scanarchives Decompress and scan zip, tar, gzip, warc, arc with
Siegfried
--save_assets SAVE_ASSETS
DEPRECATED. Non-functional in Brunnhilde 1.9.1+ but
retained for API stability
--load_assets LOAD_ASSETS
DEPRECATED. Non-functional in Brunnhilde 1.9.1+ but
retained for API stability
--csv CSV Path to Siegfried CSV file to read as input
(directories only)
--stdin Read Siegfried CSV from piped stdin (directories only)
-o, --overwrite Overwrite reports directory if it already exists
--in-memory-db Use in-memory sqlite database rather than writing it
to disk
For file paths containing spaces in directory names, enclose the entire path in single or double quotes or make sure spaces are escaped properly (e.g. CCA\ Finding\ Aid\ Demo\).
Brunnhilde will accept absolute or relative paths for source and destination.
Example commands:
Brunnhilde 1.9.0 introduces a simpler CLI syntax:
brunnhilde.py /directory/to/scan /output/directory/to/create
Or with options:
brunnhilde.py -ndz /home/user/diskimage.dd output_directory - scan a disk image (-d), skip the clamav virus check (-n), and instruct Siegfried to scan the contents of zip, tar, gzip, warc, and arc archive files (-z)
sf -csv . | brunnhilde.py --stdin . output_directory - read a Siegfried CSV report of current directory from piped stdin
brunnhilde.py --csv /path/to/existing/siegfried.csv source_directory output_directory - read a Siegfried CSV report of source_directory from a file
The old way of calling Brunnhilde is officially deprecated but will continue to be supported for API stability:
brunnhilde.py /path/to/directory/to/scan /path/to/outputs/directory name_of_output_dir
Some examples:
brunnhilde.py -z "/home/bcadmin/Desktop/Folder to Scan" /home/bcadmin/Desktop brunnhilde-test-0 - results in a new directory "brunnhilde-test-0" on the BitCurator desktop containing various reports on input source "Folder to Scan".
brunnhilde.py -nz . /Users/twalsh/Desktop/ARCH123456 - results in new directory "ARCH123456" on Mac desktop containing various reports on current working directory (-n skips ClamAV virus scan).
By default, Brunnhilde will write a sqlite database to the output directory. To instead have Brunnhilde create and use an in-memory database in RAM, pass --in-memory-db.
By default, Brunnhilde will use ClamAV to scan the contents of a directory or files in a disk image. Findings are written to a log and to the terminal. If any threats are found, Brunnhilde will print a warning to the terminal and direct the user to the ClamAV log file.
By default, the maximum filesize and scansize for ClamAV are limited. To enable scanning of large files and large numbers of files, pass --largefiles as an argument. This will enable scans of unlimited size and scanning of files up to 4GB (files larger than 4GB are not supported by clamscan).
To disable virus scanning, pass -n or --noclam as an argument. Virus scanning is skipped in Windows regardless of the options passed to Brunnhilde.
By default, Brunnhilde uses the following Siegfried command:
sf -csv -hash md5 DIR > CSV
To enable scanning of archive files (zip, tar, gzip, warc, arc), pass -z or --scanarchives as an argument.
To force Siegfried to pause for 1 second between file scans, pass -t or --throttle as an argument.
To force Siegfried to log verbose output to the terminal while processing, pass -v or --verbosesf as an argument.
In Brunnhilde 1.9+, you can pass Brunnhilde a Siegfried CSV file via piped stdin with the --stdin flag or by providing the path to a Siegfried CSV file with --csv CSV. The --stdin and --csv CSV options are limited to directory sources and do not work with disk images. When using these options, make sure that the source argument passed to Brunnhilde matches the directory scanned by Siegfried. Otherwise some options (e.g. virus scanning, running bulk_extractor) and statistics (e.g. total size) will not work as expected.
Brunnhilde uses the md5 hash algorithm by default. Other options are sha1, sha256, sha512, or none.
To change the type of hash used, pass --hash HASH as an argument to Brunnhilde, replacing HASH with your choice of sha1, sha256, or sha512.
If the user specifies not to calculate checksums with --hash none, the resulting CSV outputs and HTML report will not contain information calculated from hash values, namely information about duplicate files in the source.
In order to to keep the HTML from being excessively large, Brunnhilde does not include Siegfried warnings in the HTML report by default (the CSV is still created).
To include Siegfried warnings in the report, pass -w or --showwarnings as an argument.
To enable scanning of files with bulk_extractor, pass -b or --bulkextractor as arguments. This is disabled by default. Results are written to a 'bulk_extractor' sub-directory. In addition, running bulk_extractor adds a Social Security Number (SSN) section to the HTML report.
In Brunnhilde 1.9+, it is possible to instruct bulk_extractor to search for user-supplied patterns. Use the --regex flag to supply the path a file containing newline-separated regular expressions: --regex /path/to/regex_file.txt.
Specify the ssn_mode passed to bulk_extractor with --ssn_mode INT. Valid choices are 0, 1, or 2. If not specified, Brunnhilde will default to 1. See the following explanation of the modes from the bulkextractor 1.5 release notes:
SSN recognition: you are now able to specify one of three SSN recognition modes:
-S ssn_mode=0 SSN’s must be labeled “SSN:”. Dashes or no dashes are okay.
-S ssn_mode=1 No “SSN” required, but dashes are required.
-S ssn_mode=2 No dashes required. Allow any 9-digit number that matches SSN allocation range.
In -d mode, Brunnhilde uses SleuthKit's tsk_recover to export files from a disk image into a "carved files" directory for analysis. This works with raw images by default. In BitCurator or any other environment where libewf has been compiled into SleuthKit, Brunnhilde's -d mode also supports forensic disk image formats, including aff and ewf (E01). Due to the limitations of SleuthKit, Brunnhilde does not yet support characterizing disks that use the UDF filesystem.
Note: tsk_recover does not retain file system dates, so the date reporting functionality of Brunnhilde is limited for non-HFS disk images. It is advised to create DFXML or similar files to retain/analyze file system metadata such as date stamps. In Brunnhilde 1.6.0+, a fiwalk-generated DFXML file is created for all non-HFS disk images.
By default, Brunnhilde will keep a copy of the files exported from disk images in a "carved_files" directory. If you do not wish to keep a copy of these files after reporting is finished, you can pass the -r or --removefiles flags as arguments to Brunnhilde, which will cause it to delete the "carved_files" directory once all other tasks have finished.
Brunnhilde also includes some options for more granular control of tsk_recover:
-a: Export only allocated files (by default, Brunnhilde passes the -e option to tsk_recover, instructing it to extract all files from disk images, including deleted files, for reporting)
--tsk_fstype: Specify file system type in image (if not specified, tsk_recover will make best guess; to see possible values, type tsk_recover -f list in a terminal)
--tsk_imgtype: Specify disk image type (if not specified, tsk_recover will make best guess; to see possible values, type tsk_recover -i list in a terminal)
--tsk_sector_offset: Specify which volume on a disk to extract files from based on sector offset (see tsk_recover man page for more details)
An example command for these values might be:
brunnhilde.py -d --tsk_fstype fat --tsk_imgtype ewf --tsk_sector_offset 59 sampleimage.E01 . test
Disk image mode is not supported in Windows.
There is a known bug in older versions of unhfs, the command-line version of HFSExplorer, that prevented some files from being extracted from HFS disks. Be sure that you have the bugfix release of HFSExplorer installed. Versions of BitCurator since 1.7.106 are fine.
To characterize HFS formatted disks in Brunnhilde, pass both the -d and --hfs flags as arguments, and be sure to use a raw disk image as the source (HFSExplorer is unable to process forensically packaged disk images). This functionality works "off the shelf" in BitCurator. Non-BitCurator environments will require you to install additional dependencies.
To extract AppleDouble resource forks from HFS-formatted disk images, pass the --hfs_resforks or --resforks flag in addition to -d and --hfs.
To instruct unhfs/HFS Explorer to extract files from a speciic partition rather than using its default autodetection, pass the partition number as an integer with the --hfs_partition flag, e.g. --hfs_partition 1.
To instruct unhfs/HFS Explorer to extract only a specific file or directory from the HFS file system, pass the POSIX path with the hfs_fsroot flag, e.g. --hfs_fsroot /Users/tessa/backup/ or --hfs_fsroot "my backup.dmg".
All dependencies are already installed in BitCurator 1.7.106+. See instructions below for installing dependencies if you wish to use Brunnhilde in a different environment (Linux, Mac, or Windows).
In Brunnhilde 1.9+, an internet connection is no longer required.
Brunnhilde 1.8 and below requires an internet connection to download the HTML report's Bootstrap JavaScript and CSS dependencies. If you are using Brunnhilde 1.8 or below in an environment without an internet connection, you can manually copy the assets directory from the Brunnhilde source repo into a directory named brunnhilde in your user's home directory, or use the --load_assets PATH flag to specify an alternate path to a Brunnhilde assets directory to use.
In Brunnhilde 1.9, the HTML report no longer uses Bootstrap and so does not need to download or cache JavaScript and CSS files.
For Brunnhilde to report on any directory of content, the following must be installed in addition to Brunnhilde:
- Python (2.7 or 3.4+; Python 3 is recommended)
- Siegfried: Brunnhilde is now compatible with all version of Siegfried, including 1.6+. It does not support MIME-Info or FDD signatures: for Brunnhilde to work, Siegfried must be using the PRONOM signature file only. If you have been using MIME-Info or FDD signatures as a replacement for or alongside PRONOM with Siegfried 1.5/1.6 on your machine, entering
roy build -multi 0in the terminal should return you to Siegfried's default PRONOM-only identification mode and allow Brunnhilde to work properly.
Functions such as reporting on the contents of disk images, scanning for personally identifiable information (PII), and virus scanning introduce additional dependencies.
- SleuthKit: Carves files from and creates DFXML reports for disk images containing FAT, NTSF, HFS+, EXT2/3, ISO9660, UFS, RAW, SWAP, and YAFFS2 file systems. Note: SleuthKit works only with raw disk images by default, and has additional dependencies such as libewf and afflib that may or may not be installed depending on installation method for working with forensically-packaged disk images.
- HFSExplorer: Carves files from disk images containing HFS file system
- bulk_extractor: Scans for PII
- ClamAV: Scans for viruses
- tree: Reports on directory structure
Note: Assumes Debian-based distro. If other, use appropriate package manager or build from source.
- HFSExplorer: Download bin files from bugfix snapshot and move to /usr/share/hfsexplorer.
- bulk_extractor: Build from source distribution using instructions found here.
- Other dependencies:
# sleuthkit
git clone git://github.com/sleuthkit/sleuthkit.git
cd sleuthkit
./bootstrap
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
# clamav
sudo apt-get install clamav
sudo freshclam
# tree
sudo apt-get install tree
Note: If not already installed on your system, first install Homebrew.
- HFSExplorer: Download bin files from bugfix snapshot, unzip, rename directory to 'hfsexplorer' and move to /usr/local/share.
- Other dependencies:
brew install sleuthkit
brew install bulk_extractor
brew install clamav
brew install tree
Note: Windows support for Brunnhilde is limited. Normal reporting of directories should work without issue. Scanning of disk images, virus scanning, generating tree reports, and running bulk_extractor are not currently supported in Windows.
- Canadian Centre for Architecture
- Tessa Walsh
This project was initially developed in 2016-2017 for the Canadian Centre for Architecture by Tessa Walsh, Digital Archivist, as part of the development of the Archaeology of the Digital project.
Thank you to Richard Lehane for writing Siegfried, Ross Spencer for ideas and help, Kevin Powell for suggesting the additions of ClamAV and bulk_extractor and writing the initial code to integrate these tools, Brian Dietz for suggesting improvements in tsk_recover and macOS functionality, and to the PRONOM team at the UK National Archives for building and maintaining such a wonderful tool.