The original part of Sleuth Kit is a C library and collection of command line file and volume system forensic analysis tools. The file system tools allow you to examine file systems of a suspect computer in a non-intrusive fashion. Because the tools do not rely on the operating system to process the file systems, deleted and hidden content is shown. It runs on Windows and Unix platforms.
The volume system (media management) tools allow you to examine the layout of disks and other media. The Sleuth Kit supports DOS partitions, BSD partitions (disk labels), Mac partitions, Sun slices (Volume Table of Contents), and GPT disks. With these tools, you can identify where partitions are located and extract them so that they can be analyzed with file system analysis tools.
When performing a complete analysis of a system, we all know that command line tools can become tedious. Autopsy is a graphical interface to the tools in The Sleuth Kit, which allows you to more easily conduct an investigation. Autopsy provides case management, image integrity, keyword searching, and other automated operations.
The Sleuth Kit is written in C and Perl and uses some code and design from The Coroner's Toolkit (TCT). The Sleuth Kit has been tested on:
Open source software allows you to customize the tools for your environment and validate the code. See Open Source Digital Forensics Tools: The Legal Argument.
If you have a feature request, refer to the Support page for details on submitting it.