plaso

Plaso (Plaso Langar Að Safna Öllu) - super timeline all the things

Plaso (Plaso Langar Að Safna Öllu), or super timeline all the things, is a Python-based engine used by several tools for automatic creation of timelines. Plaso default behavior is to create super timelines but it also supports creating more targeted timelines.

These timelines support digital forensic investigators/analysts, to correlate the large amount of information found in logs and other files found on an average computer.

A longer version

The initial purpose of Plaso was to collect all timestamped events of interest on a computer system and have them aggregated in a single place for computer forensic analysis (aka Super Timeline).

However Plaso has become a framework that supports:

adding new parsers or parsing plug-ins;
adding new analysis plug-ins;
writing one-off scripts to automate repetitive tasks in computer forensic analysis or equivalent.

And is moving to support:

adding new general purpose parses/plugins that may not have timestamps associated to them;
adding more analysis context;
tagging events;
allowing more targeted approach to the collection/parsing.