The packages are maintained by the Debian Forensics team

May 25, 2017 22:42 GMT  ·  By

Debian developer Michael 'mika' Prokop has announced today that his team over at Debian Forensics will include and maintain a bunch of digital forensics tools, along with their dependencies, in the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" release.

Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" should hit the streets any moment now, and it will become the most stable and advanced version of the popular Linux-based operating system shipping with some of the latest, well-tested GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications.

Apart from the usual tools that most Debian users expect to find in the software repositories of the upcoming distribution, there will be several packages aimed at those interested in digital forensics. Many of these are new and aren't included in the current Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" repositories.

"Repeating what I did for the last Debian releases with the #newinwheezy and #newinjessie games, it's time for the #newinstretch game," said Michael Prokop. "Debian/stretch AKA Debian 9.0 will include a bunch of packages for people interested in digital forensics."

Here are the digital forensics tools shipped with Debian Stretch

Among the digital forensics tools that will be included in Debian Stretch's repos, we can mention bruteforce-salted-openssl for finding the passphrase for OpenSSL-encrypted files, cewl for generating custom word lists, and dislocker for reading and writing encrypted BitLocker volumes.

Also worth a mention are the hashdeep and hashrat tools, which can be used for recursively compute hashsums or piecewise hashings. Additionally, you'll find the pompem exploit and vulnerability finder, rekall memory analysis and incident response framework, and unhide.rb tool for finding processes hidden by rootkits.

Of course, these are accompanied by dozens of libraries, and you can find the entire list in the blog announcement. In the meantime, we'll keep our fingers crossed for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system to hit the streets in the coming weeks so we can finally upgrade our Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" installations.