Abbreviation NSRL Parent organization NIST | Type GO | |
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The National Software Reference Library (NSRL), is a project of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which maintains a repository of known software, file profiles and file signatures for use by law enforcement and other organizations involved with computer forensic investigations. The project is supported by the United States Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory (DCFL), the U.S. Customs Service, software vendors, and state and local law enforcement. It also provides a research environment for computational analysis of large sets of files.
Components
The NSRL is made up of three major elements:
- A large physical collection of commercial software packages (e.g., operating systems, off-the-shelf application software);
- A database containing detailed information, or metadata, about each file that makes up each of those software packages;
- A smaller public dataset containing the most widely used metadata for each file in the collection that is published and updated quarterly. This is called the Reference Data Set.
References
National Software Reference Library Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA