Announcing Sentinel: Securing open-source digital forensics tools
Today we're launching Sentinel, a program to provide free security reviews for open-source digital forensics tools.
The forensics community has built an incredible ecosystem of open-source tools. These tools process sensitive evidence and help solve crimes every day. But many have never received a professional security review.
How we're helping
Mobasi performs deep, AI-driven code reviews of open-source digital forensics tools, looking for security vulnerabilities and analyzing dependencies for supply chain risks. When we find issues, we follow responsible disclosure practices - notifying maintainers, giving them time to respond, and submitting pull requests with fixes where appropriate. Findings are published through the CVE process once maintainers have had the opportunity to address them.
Why we're doing this
Like other products in the digital forensic ecosystem, Mobasi is built on these tools. We depend on them. And we believe in giving back to the community that makes our work possible. If the forensics ecosystem is more secure, everyone benefits - investigators, victims, and the pursuit of justice.
The consequences of security gaps in digital forensics tools are severe. Simson Garfinkel, author of bulk_extractor, after we reported a potential RCE exploit:
"Imagine being able to run attack code on the forensic investigator's or police officer's computer after they have seized your phone or laptop and returned it to their lab. Imagine you could run that code silently, undetected. What kind of payload would you craft? Delete files? Implicate the investigators? Worm your way to the internet? That's the level of threat raised by this security report."
Maintain an open-source forensics tool? We'd like to help.