The Sleuth Kit
The Sleuth Kit (TSK) is a library and collection of Unix- and Windows-based utilities for extracting data from disk drives and other storage so as to facilitate the forensic analysis of computer systems. It forms the foundation for Autopsy, a better known tool that is essentially a graphical user interface to the command line utilities bundled with The Sleuth Kit.
| Original author(s) | Brian Carrier |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 4.12.0
/ January 25, 2023 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C, Perl |
| Operating system | Unix-like, Windows |
| Type | Computer forensics |
| License | IPL, CPL, GPL |
| Website | www |
The collection is open source and protected by the GPL, the CPL and the IPL. The software is under active development and it is supported by a team of developers. The initial development was done by Brian Carrier who based it on The Coroner's Toolkit. It is the official successor platform.
The Sleuth Kit is capable of parsing NTFS, FAT/ExFAT, UFS 1/2, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, HFS, ISO 9660 and YAFFS2 file systems either separately or within disk images stored in raw (dd), Expert Witness or AFF formats. The Sleuth Kit can be used to examine most Microsoft Windows, most Apple Macintosh OSX, many Linux and some other UNIX computers.
The Sleuth Kit can be used via the included command line tools, or as a library embedded within a separate digital forensic tool such as Autopsy or log2timeline/plaso.