The National Software Reference Library (NSRL), is a project of the
National Institute of Standards and Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...
(NIST) which maintains a repository of known software, file profiles and file signatures for use by law enforcement and other organizations involved with computer forensic investigations. The project is supported by the
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a United States federal executive departments, federal executive department of the U.S. government that oversees the domestic enforcement of Law of the Unite ...
's
National Institute of Justice, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...
(FBI),
Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory (DCFL), the
U.S. Customs Service, software vendors, and state and local law enforcement.
It also provides a research environment for computational analysis of large sets of files.
Components
The NSRL is made up of three major elements:
# A large physical collection of commercial software packages (e.g.,
operating systems
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
, off-the-shelf application software);
# A database containing detailed information, or
metadata
Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive ...
, about each file that makes up each of those software packages;
# A smaller public dataset containing the most widely used metadata for each file in the collection that is published and updated quarterly. This is called the ''Reference Data Set''.
Reference Data Set
The NSRL collects
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
from various sources and computes
message digests, or cryptographic hash values, from them. The digests are stored in the Reference Data Set (RDS) which can be used to identify "known" files on digital media. This will help alleviate much of the effort involved in determining which files are important as
evidence
Evidence for a proposition is what supports the proposition. It is usually understood as an indication that the proposition is truth, true. The exact definition and role of evidence vary across different fields. In epistemology, evidence is what J ...
on computers or file systems that have been seized as part of criminal investigations.
Although the RDS hashset contains some malicious software (such as
steganography and
hacking tools) it does not contain illicit material (e.g. indecent images).
The collection of original software media is maintained in order to provide repeatability of the calculated hash values, ensuring admissibility of this data in
court
A court is an institution, often a government entity, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between Party (law), parties and Administration of justice, administer justice in Civil law (common law), civil, Criminal law, criminal, an ...
.
In 2004 the NSRL released a set of hashes for verifying
eVoting software, as part of the US
Election Assistance Commission
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource of information regarding elec ...
's Electronic Voting Security Strategy.
As of October 1, 2013 the Reference Data Set is at version 2.42 and contains over 33.9 million unique hash values. The
data set
A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more table (database), database tables, where every column (database), column of a table represents a particular Variable (computer sci ...
is available at no cost to the public.
In addition to operating system and application software, the library has also collected numerous popular video game titles to be used both as part of data forensics, as well as partially to serve as
video game preservation.
See also
*
Digital forensics
References
External links
*
{{Digital forensics
United States Department of Commerce
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Digital forensics organizations