                          NSRL Removal Notes
                     Sleuth Kit Reference Document 
                       http://www.sleuthkit.org

                            Brian Carrier
                      Last Updated: Aug 25, 2003


The NSRL functionality has been temporarily removed from 'sorter'
(and therefore Autopsy) until it can be better determined as to how
to identify the known good and known bad files in it.  It was
originally thought that only software from a box was included in
the NSRL and therefore everything could be trusted.  This was false
and there are other types of hashes in it from "Hacker Tools" and
maybe rootkits in the future.

This problem is not easily solved because there is not a clear
taxonomy of categories in the NSRL.  There are 100 different
categories that tools fall into and one of which is "hacker tools".
I do not want to maintain a database of what should be "good" and
what should be "bad", so until a more scalable solution is identified
(besides having the user select good vs bad for 100 categories),
the functionality has been removed.

brian


