This reduces the effort required to determine which files are important as evidence and which are not. When a law enforcement organization seizes a computer or mobile device as part of a criminal investigation, they can use the RDS to quickly identify the known files on that device. We generate digital signatures from all files in that archive and release them in a quarterly Reference Data Set (RDS). The National Software Reference Library is a regularly updated archive of known, traceable software applications collected by NIST.The projects listed below are just a few examples of how we help the digital forensics community to address these challenges. Digital forensic investigators face challenges such as extracting data from damaged or destroyed devices, locating individual items of evidence among vast quantities of data, and ensuring that their methods capture data reliably without altering it in any way. In recent years, more varied sources of data have become important, including motor vehicles, aerial drones and the cloud. This includes information from computers, hard drives, mobile phones and other data storage devices. What is digital forensics? Digital forensics is the field of forensic science that is concerned with retrieving, storing and analyzing electronic data that can be useful in criminal investigations.
