Submission + - The National Software Reference Library
An anonymous reader writes: Few people are aware that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains a huge database of software file signatures and file profiles. They collect original media for off-the-shelf software and process the files to obtain digital signatures that uniquely identify them. The information is stored in a database matching files to SHA-1 and MD5 signature hashes. This database is used by law enforcement agencies around the world to address the problem of sifting through files during forensic computer searches. By tapping the database agents can exclude known files from consideration and only focus on user created files. The database also allows the identification of files being traded on P2P networks. As of September 2006 the database contains 11,514,592 unique SHA-1 and MD5 signatures and is growing at the rate of betweekn 250K and 1M new unique signatures per quarter. And the best news of all is that the database is freely available as a set of CD images downloadable from the
National Software Reference Library web site.
