spotlight_parser

This code reads and extracts data from spotlight databases present on macOS and iOS.

License

GPL v3

Latest version

1.0.2 - Download here

It is recommended to use the mac_apt_artifact_only script/exe (from mac_apt) instead of this project as that uses this same code, but also offers a few extra features like SQLITE output, and creating separate views for ios apps.

Dependencies

If running from code, you will need python 3.7 and the following python packages installed:

• lz4
• pyliblzfse

These can be installed using the command pip3 install lz4 pyliblzfse

Usage

This script will process individual Spotlight database files which are always named store.db and .store.db. You will need to provide a path to this file and an output path, with syntax as shown below.

spotlight_parser.py [-p OUTPUT_PREFIX] <path_to_database> <output_folder>

Example:
python spotlight_parser.py c:\spot\store.db c:\output

Spotlight database locations and types

On macOS, under each volume at location /.Spotlight-V100/Store-V2/<UUID> where <UUID> represents a store id, you should find files named store and .store which are the Spotlight databases. Provide these as input to this script.

Since macOS 10.13, there are also spotlight databases for each user under ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/index.spotlightV3/

iOS spotlight databases are also supported now. These can be found here:

• /private/var/mobile/Library/Spotlight/CoreSpotlight/NSFileProtectionComplete/index.spotlightV2
• /private/var/mobile/Library/Spotlight/CoreSpotlight/NSFileProtectionCompleteUnlessOpen/index.spotlightV2
• /private/var/mobile/Library/Spotlight/CoreSpotlight/NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication/index.spotlightV2

For iOS databases, you will also need to have the files that begin with dbStr (which are available in the same folder as store.db). These files are specific to that instance of store.db. Ideally, just extract the whole folder (instead of a single file).

Spotlight resources by me

• Paper - Investigating spotlight internals to extract metadata
• Slides from NW3C presentation on Spotlight

Thanks

Mason Bartle for porting the code to python3.