An interesting challenge.

[Murphyman06]

Hey guys,

 

So I am a university student studying Computer Forensics, however I have quite a bit of experience with PHP. Because of this I am doing my project in PHP because I don't know any other language.

 

The reason I am posting is because I want to be able to pass site a .db file from a Skype installation and do some stuff with it based on the content (starting with simple, listing conversations and contacts and such). Now I know this is possible in general because there are small apps that do it, but I need to make mine in PHP (its going to do similar thigns with other applications such as Kazaa and BitTorrent in the future).

 

So my main problem is: How do I read the DB file in PHP, find what fields it has and pick out specifics and use them for crazy things.

 

The DB file that is useful is located in  C:\Users\Doktor\AppData\Roaming\Skype\[uSER NAME] and is called main.db (as far as I can tell). The encoding is in SQLite I think.

 

Any Suggestions you guys have would be extremely useful and appreciated!

[JAY6390]

From what I've seen, you're right in that it's SQLite

One thing you will notice is that if Skype is running while you try and access it it won't let you since the file is locked (also can't copy the file to somewhere else and open that)

[Murphyman06]

Yea I've noticed that. But the intention is that its useful to people who are examining a hard drive as opposed to every bob and john, so they will export it from their preferred Forensics suite so it shouldn't really be an issue

 

In a while I'm going to try loading a sample on I've made using PHP and see what happens. I've no experience working with flat database files so I expect it to not go well!