The Advanced Forensics File format 4 was originally designed and published in "Extending the advanced forensic format to accommodate multiple data sources, logical evidence, arbitrary information and forensic workflow" M.I. Cohen, Simson Garfinkel and Bradley Schatz, digital investigation 6 (2009) S57–S68.
The format is an open source format used for the storage of digital evidence and data.
The original paper was released with an earlier implementation written in python. This project is a complete open source re-implementation for a general purpose AFF4 library.
Not all features described in the paper are currently supported:
- Writing and Reading ZipFile style volumes.
- Writing and Reading AFF4 Image streams using the deflate or snappy compressor.
- Writing and reading RDF metadata using both YAML and Turtle.
What is not yet supported:
- Encrypted AFF4 volumes.
- Persistent data store.
- HTTP backed streams.
- Splitting an AFF4 Image across multiple volumes.
- Map streams.
- Support for signed statements or Bill of Materials.
- Logical file acquisition.
This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.