This talk hold in Riga at DSS ITSEC 2018 – 9th Annual International Cyber Security Conference is about technology assessment and a case study evaluating the suitability of Rust in Digital Forensics.

Within the framework of this study the suitability of the Rust ecosystem for forensic tool development was evaluated. As case study, the tool Strings­ext was developed. Starting from analysing the specific requirements of forensic software in general and those of the present case study, all stages of the software development life-cycle have been executed, up to the first production release.

Strings­ext is a reimplementation and enhancement of the GNU-strings tool, a widely used program in forensic investigations. Strings­ext recognizes Cyrillic, CJKV characters and other scripts in all supported multi-byte-encodings while GNU-strings fails in finding these in UTF-16 and other encodings. Read more about Stringsext at the Stringsext project site

During the case study it has become apparent that the Rust ecosystem provides good support for secure coding principles and unit testing. Furthermore, the benchmarks showed a satisfactory performance of the resulting Strings­ext binaries comparable to the original C version.