Added in Spotlight Shortcuts
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.
Bookmark and Alias BLOB Parsing
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:
- --blob_hex = This is the same as what --blob was before. Just a hexdump of the BLOB data.
- --blob_parse_raw = This shows the raw output from mac_alias, not exactly the easiest to read but good for debugging.
- --blob_parse_human = This shows the pieces of the BLOBs in a (mostly) human-friendly (example below).
I want to say thank you to a few folks that allowed these additions to be made:
- Alastair Houghton & Wim Lewis - For mac_alias and the reversing the Alias/Bookmark structures. I took a shot at it years ago and gave up, really appreciate someone else's effort!
- Phill Moore of thisweekin4n6.com - You'll notice some support for legacy keys in the com.apple.recentitems.plist have also been added in this update thanks to Phil and his oddly old MRUs files! :) I also appreciate his testing of this tool on Windows also. (Sorry Phil, didn't get a chance to test it on Windows yet!)
- Shout out to Patrick Olsen for his work on Alias V3 structures. Unfortunately I did not get to use his research - turns out V3 Alias BLOBs do not get used in any of the MRUs that I'm parsing in this script (they are all V2)! Maybe in the future!