Running on SIFT

Running on the SANS SIFT Workstation

5-minute setup guide for getting dart-agent running on a SIFT VM.

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Why SIFT is the primary target

SANS SIFT Workstation v22.04 is the de-facto open-source DFIR distribution, used by every SANS FOR-class student and most working analysts. It ships with:

• The forensic toolchain Agentic-DART expects (Volatility, Plaso, Eric Zimmerman tools, hindsight)
• Mounted-evidence conventions (/mnt/case-evidence, read-only by default)
• Python 3.10+

The hackathon submission is primarily validated on SIFT v22.04. Other Linux distros work; this is just the most reproducible path.

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Step 1 — Get SIFT

If you don't have it, download it from https://www.sans.org/tools/sift-workstation/. It is a large VM image; VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels images all work.

Default user: sansforensics (SIFT) — we'll create / use analyst for Agentic-DART so the prompt matches the documentation:

sudo adduser analyst
sudo usermod -aG sudo analyst
su - analyst

(Or just stay as sansforensics. The docs reference analyst@siftworkstation for visual consistency, not as a hard requirement.)

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Step 2 — Install Agentic-DART

The installer is venv-first and also clones + installs the collector adapter. On a SANS SIFT Workstation, --full additionally stages the SIFT toolchain (via cast) and the Eric Zimmerman Tools:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/Juwon1405/agentic-dart.git
cd agentic-dart
bash scripts/install.sh --full      # drop --full for the lightweight install

The installer ends with an API-free health check. You can re-run it anytime:

python3 scripts/healthcheck.py

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Step 3 — Authenticate

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY='sk-...'

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Step 4 — Run the bundled demo and a case

# Offline demo — no credentials needed (full loop + audit chain + bypass test)
bash examples/demo-run.sh

# A real evaluation case (needs the auth from Step 3)
python3 run_eval.py --case self-evaluation/case-01

Offline-demo output ends with the architectural bypass proof:

[dart-agent] audit chain: chain verified, tail=<sha256-prefix>...
[demo] PASS — "ToolNotFound: 'execute_shell' is not exposed by dart-mcp"

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Step 5 — Run the full test suite

export PYTHONPATH="$PWD/dart_audit/src:$PWD/dart_mcp/src:$PWD/dart_agent/src:$PWD/dart_corr/src"
python3 -m pytest tests/ dart_corr/tests/

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Step 6 — Run against your own case

The incident host gets nothing installed — it runs the Velociraptor offline collector (one standalone binary, one execution) and produces an evidence.zip you copy back here. On this analysis server, convert it to an evidence_root/ and analyse it with run_eval.py --evidence:

# A) from a Velociraptor collection ZIP shipped from the incident host
python3 -m dart_collector_adapter --source zip \
    --input evidence.zip --output ./case-001/evidence_root --case-id case-001

# B) or from a forensic disk image (dead-disk, processed here — not on the host)
python3 -m dart_collector_adapter --source image \
    --input /path/to/case.E01 --output ./case-001/evidence_root --case-id case-001

# then analyse (real cases want more iterations than the bundled demos)
python3 run_eval.py --evidence ./case-001/evidence_root --case-id case-001 --max-iterations 25

The agent never writes to the evidence tree — that guarantee is architectural (every path goes through _safe_resolve, and there is no write_file / mount / execute_shell on the MCP wire), so a read-only mount is belt-and- braces rather than the thing the safety depends on.

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Step 7 — Look at what came out

Each run writes a timestamped directory:

out/<tier>/<case-id>/<timestamp>/
├── findings.json     typed findings (id, confidence, evidence summary)
├── report.json       full run report + primary hypothesis
├── summary.json      run metadata (model, evidence_root, usage)
└── audit.jsonl       SHA-256-chained step-by-step trace

Verify the audit chain:

python3 -m dart_audit verify out/self-evaluation/case-01/<timestamp>/audit.jsonl
# -> chain verified: <entry-count> entries, tail=<sha256-prefix>...

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Common SIFT-specific gotchas

Symptom	Fix
ImportError: dart_mcp	export PYTHONPATH="$PWD/dart_audit/src:$PWD/dart_mcp/src:$PWD/dart_agent/src"
Slow MFT correlation	SIFT VMs default to 4 GB RAM. Bump to 8 GB for >2M-row MFTs.
EvidenceRootEscape error	One of your tool args has a .. or absolute path. Check the call inputs.
Verify says mismatch	Audit log was edited. Re-run; never edit audit.jsonl by hand.

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See also

• Operator guide — distro-agnostic version of this guide
• Running on macOS — for analysts on M-series Macs
• Architecture deep dive