National Software Reference Library

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The National Software Reference Library (NSRL), a project of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is supported by the United States Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, federal, state, and local law enforcement, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to promote efficient and effective use of computer technology in the investigation of crimes involving computers.

The NSRL collects software from various sources and incorporates file profiles computed from this software into a Reference Data Set (RDS) of information. The RDS can be used to review files on a computer by matching file profiles in the RDS. This will help alleviate much of the effort involved in determining which files are important as evidence on computers or file systems that have been seized as part of criminal investigations.

The RDS is a collection of message digests of known, traceable software applications. There are application hash function values in the hash set which may be considered malicious, i.e. steganography tools and hacking scripts. NIST maintains a collection of original software media in order to provide repeatability of the calculated hash values, ensuring admissibility of this data in court.

Reference Data Set Version 2.14, October 2006, has over 11 million unique SHA-1, MD5 and CRC32 values. The data set is available at no cost to the public.

The NSRL gained visibility in 2004 in conjunction with voting initiatives, most notably in the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Electronic Voting Security Strategy.