National Software Reference Library: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:44, 1 September 2010

Revision as of 20:48, 1 September 2010

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The '''National Software Reference Library''' (NSRL), a project of the [[National Institute of Standards and Technology]], is supported by the [[United States Department of Justice]]'s [[National Institute of Justice]], federal, state, and local law enforcement, and the [[National Institute of Standards and Technology]] to promote efficient and effective use of [[computer]] technology in the [[Digital forensics|forensic investigation]] of [[crime]]s involving computers.

==Reference Data Set==

The NSRL collects [[software]] from various sources and computes [[message digest]]s 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]] on computers or file systems that have been seized as part of criminal investigations.<ref name="mead" /> Although the RDS hashset contains some malicious software (such as [[steganography]] and [[hacking (computer security)|hacking]] tools) it does not contain illicit material (e.g. indecent images).

NIST maintains a collection of original software media in order to provide repeatability of the calculated hash values, ensuring admissibility of this data in [[court]].

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Reference Data Set Version 2.14, October 2006, has over 11 million unique [[SHA-1]], [[MD5]] and [[CRC32]] values. The [[data set]] is available at no cost to the public.

In 2004 the NRSL released a set of hashes for verifyinhverifying [[eVoting]] software, as part of the US [[Election Assistance Commission]]'s Electronic Voting Security Strategy.<ref name="cw" />

==See also==

* [[Digital forensics]]

==References==