14 DAY TRIAL // CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is a GNU/Linux live distribution that aims to be a complete forensic environment. Its developer has just released version 6.0, which is now using a new Ubuntu base.
CAINE 6.0 now has the "Dark Matter" codename and it's based on Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (Trusty Tahr), which is the latest stable version available right now from Canonical. This is a complete forensic environment that comes with a comprehensive graphical interface that should prove to be very useful.
There are very few operating systems of this kind and CAINE is one of the best. In fact, it's used by law enforcement agencies in Italy. The results it produces can be accepted as evidence, so the developers must be certain that they provide the best software solutions. The OS is only updated when releases are made for LTS versions of Ubuntu.
What the developers of CAINE are saying
"CAINE represents fully the spirit of the Open Source philosophy, because the project is completely open, everyone could take the legacy of the previous developer or project manager. The distro is open source, the Windows side (Wintaylor) is open source and, the last but not the least, the distro is installable, so giving the opportunity to rebuild it in a new brand version, so giving a long life to this project."
These forensic tools are being used by people in the law enforcement and judicial branches to investigate various crimes. The tools integrated in the system can recover deleted messages, repair hard drives, and generally provide concrete evidence that can be used in the court of law. The fact that the system is open source is important because anyone can download it and see what the investigators are using.
The developers of CAINE have made it clear in the changelog that this is more like a maintenance update than anything else. For example, the Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 wireless card drivers are now supported, the boot-repair package has been added, the gddrescue packages have been updated, the Sun VTOC volume system handling has been fixed, the Shellshock vulnerability has been corrected, and the password request in polkit has been fixed.
A complete list of changes, updates, new features, and applications can be found in the official announcement. You can download CAINE 6.0 "Dark Matter" right now from Softpedia. This is a Live CD and it should work on most computers out there. It has a new Linux kernel and it's compatible with a large array of hardware components.