EVTX

This is a parser for the Windows EVTX format.

Supported rust version is latest stable rust (minimum 1.34) or nightly.

Documentation

Python bindings are available as well at https://github.com/omerbenamram/pyevtx-rs (and at PyPi https://pypi.org/project/evtx/)

Features

• Implemented using 100% safe rust - and works on all platforms supported by rust (that have stdlib).
• Multi-threaded.
• Supports XML and JSON outputs, both being zero-copy and independent of each other (JSON documents are being built directly from the inner representation of the binary xml token tree, no xml2json is performed!)
• Supports some basic recovery of missing records/chunks!

Example usage (associated binary utility):

• cargo install evtx
• run evtx_dump <evtx_file> to dump contents of evtx records as xml.
• run evtx_dump -o json <evtx_file> to dump contents of evtx records as JSON.

Note: by default, the library will try to utilize multithreading, this means that the records may be returned out of order.

To force single threaded usage (which will also ensure order), -t 1 can be passed.

Example usage (as library):

```rust use evtx::EvtxParser; use std::path::PathBuf;

fn main() { // Change this to a path of your .evtx sample. let fp = PathBuf::from(format!("{}/samples/security.evtx", std::env::var("CARGOMANIFESTDIR").unwrap()));

let mut parser = EvtxParser::from_path(fp).unwrap();
for record in parser.records() {
    match record {
        Ok(r) => println!("Record {}\n{}", r.event_record_id, r.data),
        Err(e) => eprintln!("{}", e),
    }
}

} ```

The parallel version is enabled when compiling with feature "multithreading" (enabled by default).

Benchmarking

Initial benchmarking I've performed indicate that this implementation is probably the fastest available 🍺.

I'm using a real world, 30MB sample which contains ~62K records.

This is benchmarked on my 2017 MBP.

Comparison with other libraries:

• python-evtx (https://github.com/williballenthin/python-evtx)

  With CPython this is quite slow

  time -- python3 ~/Workspace/python-evtx/scripts/evtx_dump.py ./samples/security_big_sample.evtx > /dev/null Mon Apr 1 19:41:16 2019 363.83 real 356.26 user 2.17 sys

  With PyPy (tested with pypy3.5, 7.0.0), it's taking just less than a minute (a 6x improvement!) time -- pypy3 ~/Workspace/python-evtx/scripts/evtx_dump.py ./samples/security_big_sample.evtx > /dev/null Mon Apr 1 19:41:16 2019 59.30 real 58.10 user 0.51 sys

• libevtx (https://github.com/libyal/libevtx)

  This library is written in C, so I initially expected it to be faster than my implementation.

  It clocks in about 6x faster than PyPy.

  time -- ~/Workspace/libevtx/dist/bin/evtxexport -f xml ./samples/security_big_sample.evtx > /dev/null 11.30 real 10.77 user 0.41 sys

  Note: libevtx does have multi-threading support planned (according to the readme), but isn't implemented as of writing this (April 2019).

• evtx (this library!)

  When using a single thread, this implementation is about 2.8x faster than C time -- ./target/release/main -t 1 ./samples/security_big_sample.evtx > /dev/null 4.04 real 3.90 user 0.11 sys

  With multi-threading enabled, it blazes through the file in just 1.3 seconds: time -- ./target/release/main ./samples/security_big_sample.evtx > /dev/null 1.30 real 6.10 user 0.29 sys

Caveats

• Currently unimplemented:
  • [ ] ANSI encoded nodes (codepage selection).
  • [ ] PI/cdata nodes.
  • [ ] entity/character refs.
  • [ ] EVTHandle node type.

If the parser errors on any of these nodes, feel free to open an issue or drop me an email with a sample.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.