The Sleuth Kit v3.2.1 Released

The Sleuth Kit is a C library and collection of command line file and volume system forensic analysis tools. The file system tools allow you to examine file systems of a suspect computer in a non-intrusive fashion. Because the tools do not rely on the operating system to process the file systems, deleted and hidden content is shown. It runs on Windows and Unix platforms.

The volume system (media management) tools allow you to examine the layout of disks and other media. The Sleuth Kit supports DOS partitions, BSD partitions (disk labels), Mac partitions, Sun slices (Volume Table of Contents), and GPT disks. With these tools, you can identify where partitions are located and extract them so that they can be analyzed with file system analysis tools.

When performing a complete analysis of a system, we all know that command line tools can become tedious. The Autopsy Forensic Browser is a graphical interface to the tools in The Sleuth Kit, which allows you to more easily conduct an investigation. Autopsy provides case management, image integrity, keyword searching, and other automated operations.

A complete analysis also requires more than just file and volume system analysis. When building forensic tools that analyze file content, it is easy to integrate the TSK functionality by using its C library or by processing the SQLite database that TSK can create.

Input Data

Analyzes raw (i.e. dd), Expert Witness (i.e. EnCase) and AFF file system and disk images. (Sleuth Kit Informer #11)
Supports the NTFS, FAT, UFS 1, UFS 2, EXT2FS, EXT3FS, and ISO 9660 file systems (even when the host operating system does not or has a different endian ordering).
Tools can be run on a live Windows or UNIX system during Incident Response. These tools will show files that have been "hidden" by rootkits and will not modify the A-Time of files that are viewed. (Sleuth Kit Informer #13)

Search Techniques

List allocated and deleted ASCII and Unicode file names. (Sleuth Kit Informer #14 (FAT Recovery), #16 (NTFS Orphan Files))
Display the details and contents of all NTFS attributes (including all Alternate Data Streams).
Display file system and meta-data structure details.
Create time lines of file activity, which can be imported into a spread sheet to create graphs and reports. (Sleuth Kit Informer #5)
Lookup file hashes in a hash database, such as the NIST NSRL, Hash Keeper, and custom databases that have been created with the 'md5sum' tool. (Sleuth Kit Informer #6, Sleuth Kit Informer #7)
Organize files based on their type (for example all executables, jpegs, and documents are separated). Pages of thumbnails can be made of graphic images for quick analysis. (Sleuth Kit Informer #3, #4, #5)

The Sleuth Kit is written in C and Perl and uses some code and design from The Coroner's Toolkit (TCT). The Sleuth Kit has been tested on:

Linux
Mac OS X
Windows (Visual Studio and mingw)
CYGWIN
Open & FreeBSD
Solaris

Changelog

A single dummy entry is added to the SQlite DB if no volume exists so that all programs can assume that there will be at least one volume in the table.
3184455: allow srcdir != builddir
3108272: fls arguments for -d and -u
3105539: compile error issues because of SQlite and pthreads
3173095: missing FAT files because of invalid dates.
3184419: mingew compile errors.
3191391: surround file name in quotes in mactime -d csv output

Download

TSK can be downloaded as source code that you must compile (the .tar.gz file) or as Windows executables (the .zip file). For both archive files, GPG signatures exist. Downloads are from SourceForge.net.