From: GCN
By Brian Robinson
The world of the computer forensics investigator looks to get a lot easier with the recent introduction of thousands of mobile apps to NIST’s National Software Reference Library (NSRL), which has become a vital tool for digital detectives.
***
The NSRL creates “digital fingerprints” for every file in its database — some 50 million so far — and publishes those hashes in a reference data set (RDS) that’s updated every three months. It’s freely available to whoever wants to use it. Because only legitimate files are in the RDS, investigators can use it eliminate known files that are of no interest to them and focus on illicit data, such as child abuse images, for which no hashes exist.
hello