google / Aff4
AFF4 -The Advanced Forensics File Format
The Advanced Forensics File Format 4 (AFF4) is an open source format used for the storage of digital evidence and data.
It was originally designed and published in [1] and has since been standardised as the AFF4 Standard v1.0, which is available at https://github.com/aff4/Standard. This project is a work in progress implementation, providing two library implementations, C/C++ and Python.
What is currently supported.
The focus of this implementation at present is reading images conforming with the AFF4 Standard v1.0. Canonical images are provided in the AFF4 Reference Images github project at https://github.com/aff4/ReferenceImages
- Reading ZipFile style volumes.
- Reading AFF4 Image streams using the deflate or snappy compressor.
- Reading RDF metadata using Turtle (and in some instances YAML for backwards compatibility).
What is not yet supported.
The write support in the libraries is currently broken and being worked on. Other aspects of the AFF4 that have not yet been implemented in this codebase include:
- Encrypted AFF4 volumes.
- Persistent data store.
- HTTP backed streams.
- Splitting an AFF4 Image across multiple volumes.
- Map streams.
- Support for signed statements or Bill of Materials.
- Logical file acquisition.
Notice
This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.
References
[1] "Extending the advanced forensic format to accommodate multiple data sources, logical evidence, arbitrary information and forensic workflow" M.I. Cohen, Simson Garfinkel and Bradley Schatz, digital investigation 6 (2009) S57–S68.