Turbinia is an open-source framework for deploying, managing, and running distributed forensic workloads. It is intended to automate running of common forensic processing tools (i.e. Plaso, TSK, strings, etc) to help with processing evidence in the Cloud, scaling the processing of large amounts of evidence, and decreasing response time by parallelizing processing where possible.
Turbinia is composed of different components for the client, server and the workers. These components can be run in the Cloud, on local machines, or as a hybrid of both. The Turbinia client makes requests to process evidence to the Turbinia server. The Turbinia server creates logical jobs from these incoming user requests, which creates and schedules forensic processing tasks to be run by the workers. The evidence to be processed will be split up by the jobs when possible, and many tasks can be created in order to process the evidence in parallel. One or more workers run continuously to process tasks from the server. Any new evidence created or discovered by the tasks will be fed back into Turbinia for further processing.
Communication from the client to the server is currently done with either Google Cloud PubSub or Kombu messaging. The worker implementation can use either PSQ (a Google Cloud PubSub Task Queue) or Celery for task scheduling.
More information on Turbinia and how it works can be found here.
Turbinia is currently in Alpha release.
There is an rough installation guide here.
The basic steps to get things running after the initial installation and configuration are:
turbiniactl server commandturbiniactl psqworkerturbiniactl ${evidencetype}turbiniactl statusturbiniactl can be used to start the different components, and here is the basic usage:
$ turbiniactl --help
usage: turbiniactl [-h] [-q] [-v] [-d] [-a] [-c CONFIG_FILE]
[-C RECIPE_CONFIG] [-f] [-o OUTPUT_DIR] [-L LOG_FILE]
[-r REQUEST_ID] [-R] [-S] [-V] [-D]
[-F FILTER_PATTERNS_FILE] [-j JOBS_ALLOWLIST]
[-J JOBS_DENYLIST] [-p POLL_INTERVAL] [-t TASK] [-w]
<command> ...
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-q, --quiet Show minimal output
-v, --verbose Show verbose output
-d, --debug Show debug output
-a, --all_fields Show all task status fields in output
-c CONFIG_FILE, --config_file CONFIG_FILE
Load explicit config file. If specified it will ignore
config files in other default locations
(/etc/turbinia.conf, ~/.turbiniarc, or in paths
referenced in environment variable
TURBINIA_CONFIG_PATH)
-C RECIPE_CONFIG, --recipe_config RECIPE_CONFIG
Recipe configuration data passed in as comma separated
key=value pairs (e.g. "-C
key=value,otherkey=othervalue"). These will get passed
to tasks as evidence config, and will also be written
to the metadata.json file for Evidence types that
write it
-f, --force_evidence Force evidence processing request in potentially
unsafe conditions
-o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
Directory path for output
-L LOG_FILE, --log_file LOG_FILE
Log file
-r REQUEST_ID, --request_id REQUEST_ID
Create new requests with this Request ID
-R, --run_local Run completely locally without any server or other
infrastructure. This can be used to run one-off Tasks
to process data locally.
-S, --server Run Turbinia Server indefinitely
-V, --version Show the version
-D, --dump_json Dump JSON output of Turbinia Request instead of
sending it
-F FILTER_PATTERNS_FILE, --filter_patterns_file FILTER_PATTERNS_FILE
A file containing newline separated string patterns to
filter text based evidence files with (in extended
grep regex format). This filtered output will be in
addition to the complete output
-j JOBS_ALLOWLIST, --jobs_allowlist JOBS_ALLOWLIST
An allowlist for Jobs that will be allowed to run (in
CSV format, no spaces). This will not force them to
run if they are not configured to. This is applied
both at server start time and when the client makes a
processing request. When applied at server start time
the change is persistent while the server is running.
When applied by the client, it will only affect that
processing request.
-J JOBS_DENYLIST, --jobs_denylist JOBS_DENYLIST
A denylist for Jobs we will not allow to run. See
--jobs_allowlist help for details on format and when
it is applied.
-p POLL_INTERVAL, --poll_interval POLL_INTERVAL
Number of seconds to wait between polling for task
state info
-t TASK, --task TASK The name of a single Task to run locally (must be used
with --run_local.
-w, --wait Wait to exit until all tasks for the given request
have completed
Commands:
<command>
rawdisk Process RawDisk as Evidence
googleclouddisk Process Google Cloud Persistent Disk as Evidence
googleclouddiskembedded
Process Google Cloud Persistent Disk with an embedded
raw disk image as Evidence
directory Process a directory as Evidence
listjobs List all available jobs
psqworker Run PSQ worker
celeryworker Run Celery worker
status Get Turbinia Task status
server Run Turbinia Server
config Prints out config file
testnotify Sends test notificationThe commands for processing evidence specify the metadata about that evidence
for Turbinia to process. By default, when adding new evidence to be processed,
turbiniactl will act as a client and send a request to the configured Turbinia
server, otherwise if server is specified, it will start up its own Turbinia
server process. Here's the turbiniactl usage for adding a raw disk type of
evidence to be processed by Turbinia:
$ ./turbiniactl rawdisk -h
usage: turbiniactl rawdisk [-h] -l LOCAL_PATH [-s SOURCE] [-n NAME]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-l LOCAL_PATH, --local_path LOCAL_PATH
Local path to the evidence
-s SOURCE, --source SOURCE
Description of the source of the evidence
-n NAME, --name NAME Descriptive name of the evidenceStatus information about the requests that are being or have been processed can
be viewed with the turbiniactl status command. You can specify the request ID
that was generated, or other filters like the username of the requester, or how
many days of processing history you want to view. You can also generate
statistics and reports (in markdown format) with other flags.
$ turbiniactl status -h
usage: turbiniactl status [-h] [-c] [-C] [-d DAYS_HISTORY] [-f]
[-r REQUEST_ID] [-p PRIORITY_FILTER] [-R] [-s]
[-t TASK_ID] [-u USER]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-c, --close_tasks Close tasks based on Request ID or Task ID
-C, --csv When used with --statistics, the output will be in CSV
format
-d DAYS_HISTORY, --days_history DAYS_HISTORY
Number of days of history to show
-f, --force Gatekeeper for --close_tasks
-r REQUEST_ID, --request_id REQUEST_ID
Show tasks with this Request ID
-p PRIORITY_FILTER, --priority_filter PRIORITY_FILTER
This sets what report sections are shown in full
detail in report output. Any tasks that have set a
report_priority value equal to or lower than this
setting will be shown in full detail, and tasks with a
higher value will only have a summary shown. To see
all tasks report output in full detail, set
--priority_filter=100
-R, --full_report Generate full markdown report instead of just a
summary
-s, --statistics Generate statistics only
-t TASK_ID, --task_id TASK_ID
Show task for given Task ID
-u USER, --user USER Show task for given userThis is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.