The Advanced Forensics Format (AFF) is an extensible open format for the storage of disk images and related forensic metadata. It was originally developed by Simson Garfinkel and Basis Technology. The last version of AFF is implemented in the AFFLIBv3 library, which can be found on github. AFF4 builds upon many of the concepts developed in AFF. AFF4 was developed by Michael Cohen, Simson Garfinkel and Bradley Schatz. That version can be downloaded from Google Code.
AFF3 and AFFLIBv3 have been depreciated and should not be used for new projects.
AFF was created to be an open and extensible file format to store disk images and associated metadata. The goal was to create a disk imaging format that would not lock users into a proprietary format that may limit how he or she may analyze it. An open standard enables investigators to quickly and efficiently use their preferred tools to solve crimes, gather intelligence, and resolve security incidents. The format was implemented in AFFLIB which was distributed with an open source license.
After AFFLIB was published, Joachim Metz published libewf, an open source implementation of the EnCase Expert Witness format. Later, Guidance Software modified its format to allow single disk volumes larger than 4GiB. Together these two changes significantly decreased the need for AFF and AFFLIB.
In 2009 Cohen, Garfinkel and Schatz published an article on AFF4, a new file format that incorporated and expanded on the underlying AFF ideas. AFF4 provides for multiple data views within a single data archives and allows links between archives. As a result, AFF4 natively supports selective imaging, logical file volumes, hash-based imaging, and a variety of case-management scenarios.
The original AFF format is a single file that contains segments with drive data and metadata. Its contents can be compressed, but it can be quite large as the data on modern hard disks often reach 100GB in size. AFFv3 supported three file extensions --– AFF, AFD and AFM –-- and provided a tool to easily convert between the variations.
For ease of transfer, large AFF files can be broken into multiple AFD format files. The smaller AFD files can be readily moved around a FAT32 file system which limits files to 2GB or stored on DVDs, which have similar size restrictions. The AFM format stores the metadata in an AFF file, and the disk data in a separate raw file. This format allows analysis tools that support the raw format to access the data, but without losing the metadata.
Compression and Encryption
AFF supports two compression algorithms: zlib, which is fast and reasonably efficient, and LZMA, which is slower but dramatically more efficient. zlib is the same compression algorithm used by EnCase. As a result, AFF files compressed with zlib are roughly the same size as the equivalent EnCase file. AFF files can be recompressed using the LZMA algorithm. These files are anywhere from 1/2 to 1/10th the size of the original AFF/EnCase file.
AFF2.0 supports encryption of disk images. Unlike the password implemented by EnCase, encrypted images cannot be accessed without the necessary encryption key. FTK Imager/FTK added support for this encryption in version 3.0 and are able to create and access AFF encrypted images.
- AFF Developers Guide --- A guide for programmers on how to use the AFF
- AFF Development Task List --- Want to help with AFF? Here is a list of things that need to be done.