A Web Service for File-Level Access to Disk Images

Abstract

Digital forensics tools have many potential applications in the curation of digital materials in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). Open source digital forensics tools can help LAM professionals to extract digital contents from born-digital media and make more informed preservation decisions. Many of these tools have ways to display the metadata of the digital media, but few provide file-level access without having to mount the device or use complex command-line utilities. This paper describes a project to develop software that supports access to the contents of digital media without having to mount or download the entire image. The work examines two approaches in creating this tool: First, a graphical user interface running on a local machine. Second, a web-based application running in web browser. The project incorporates existing open source forensics tools and libraries including The Sleuth Kit and libewf along with the Flask web application framework and custom Python scripts to generate web pages supporting disk image browsing.