A cross-platform parser for the Windows XML EventLog format
- 🔒 Implemented using 100% safe rust - and works on all platforms supported by rust (that have stdlib).
- ⚡ Fast - see benchmarks below. It's faster than any other implementation by order(s) of magnitude!
- 🚀 Multi-threaded.
- ✨ Supports XML and JSON outputs, both being directly constructed from the token tree and independent of each other (no xml2json conversion is performed!)
- ⛏️ Supports some basic recovery of missing records/chunks!
- 🐍 Python bindings are available as well at https://github.com/omerbenamram/pyevtx-rs (and at PyPi https://pypi.org/project/evtx/)
- Download latest executable release from https://github.com/omerbenamram/evtx/releases
- Releases are automatically built for for Windows, macOS, and Linux. (64-bit executables only)
- Build from sources using
cargo install evtx
The main binary utility provided with this crate is evtx_dump, and it provides a quick way to convert .evtx files to
different output formats.
Some examples
evtx_dump <evtx_file>will dump contents of evtx records as xml.evtx_dump -o json <evtx_file>will dump contents of evtx records as JSON.evtx_dump -f <output_file> -o json <input_file>will dump contents of evtx records as JSON to a given file.
evtx_dump can be combined with fd for convenient batch processing of files:
fd -e evtx -x evtx_dump -o jsonlwill scan a folder and dump all evtx files to a single jsonlines file.fd -e evtx -x evtx_dump '{}' -f '{.}.xmlwill create an xml file next to each evtx file, for all files in folder recursively!- If the source of the file needs to be added to json,
xargs(orgxargson mac) andjqcan be used:fd -a -e evtx | xargs -I input sh -c "evtx_dump -o jsonl input | jq --arg path "input" '. + {path: \$path}'"
Note: by default, evtx_dump 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.
use evtx::EvtxParser;
use std::path::PathBuf;
// Change this to a path of your .evtx sample.
let fp = PathBuf::from(format!("{}/samples/security.evtx", std::env::var("CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR").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).
When using multithreading - evtx is significantly faster than any other parser available.
For single core performance, it is both the fastest and the only cross-platform parser than supports both xml and JSON outputs.
Performance was benched on my machine using hyperfine (statistical measurements tool).
I'm running tests on a 12-Core AMD Ryzen 3900X.
Tests are running under WSL2, on a linux filesystem (so there shouldn't be any overhead incurred from reading windows mounts).
Libraries benched:
python-evtx(https://github.com/williballenthin/python-evtx) - With CPython and PyPylibevtx(https://github.com/libyal/libevtx)golang-evtx(https://github.com/0xrawsec/golang-evtx.git) - only JSON (uses multithreading)evtx(https://github.com/Velocidex/evtx) - only JSON.evtx(This library)
| evtx (1 thread) | evtx (8 threads) | evtx (24 threads) | libevtx (C) | velocidex/evtx (go) | golang-evtx (uses multiprocessing) | python-evtx (CPython 3.7.6) | python-evtx (PyPy 7.3.0) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30MB evtx (XML) | 1.155 s ± 0.008 s | 277.4 ms ± 5.8 ms | 177.1 ms ± 4.5 ms | 4.509 s ± 0.100 s | No support | No support | 4m11.046s (ran once) | 1m12.828s (ran once) |
| 30MB evtx (JSON) | 1.631 s ± 0.006 s | 341.6 ms ± 7.3 ms | 207.2 ms ± 7.2 ms | No support | 5.587 s ± 0.086 s | 2.216 s ± 0.027 s | No support | No support |
Note: numbers shown are real-time measurements (time it takes for invocation to complete). user-time measurements are higher when more using multithreading/multiprocessing, because of the synchronization overhead.
With 8 threads - evtx is more than 650x faster than python-evtx when dumping xml logs.
With maximum viable threads (number of logical cores) - evtx is about 8-10x faster golang-evtx. Both implementations utilize similar multithreading strategies.
- Currently unimplemented:
- CDATA nodes.
- 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.
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.
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.
