Dissect is a digital forensics and incident response framework developed by Fox-IT, part of NCC Group. It provides a consistent interface for accessing forensic evidence even when the underlying disk images, file systems and operating systems differ substantially.
Rather than requiring an examiner to manually extract files from evidence containers, mount file systems and pass individual artefacts through separate utilities, Dissect abstracts many of these layers behind a common target model. Its command-line tools can therefore query forensic evidence directly while the framework handles the underlying formats.
The main Dissect repository acts as a meta package bringing together the compatible components of the wider modular framework.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Provides target-query for querying parsed forensic artefacts.
- Offers target-shell for interactively navigating forensic targets.
- Works with evidence containers including E01, VMDK and QCoW images.
- Supports file systems including NTFS, ExtFS, APFS, Btrfs, FFS, XFS and VMFS.
- Parses Windows Registry data, Prefetch information, Event Logs and many other artefacts.
- Presents Windows, Linux and ESXi evidence through a common abstraction.
- Uses a modular architecture with reusable parsers and format implementations.
- Includes components for archives, databases, executable formats, encryption formats and volumes.
- Supports analysis of lightweight evidence containers created with Acquire.
- Reduces the need to manually extract and mount forensic evidence before analysis.
Website: github.com/fox-it/dissect
Support:
Developer: Dissect Team
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Dissect is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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