forensic-artifacts
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Machine-readable YAML knowledge base of digital forensic artifacts for use as a reference or within other cyber tools.
Summary
forensic-artifacts is an open-source, free knowledge base of digital forensic artifact definitions, written as machine-readable YAML files describing where evidence lives on a system. It requires no special tooling to consume beyond reading YAML, though the project ships Python code to validate entries against its specification, so it functions as a library or reference dataset rather than a standalone application. It is aimed at DFIRDFIRDigital forensics and incident response, investigating what happened during a security incident and containing it. The work includes preserving evidence, reconstructing activity and restoring systems. practitioners and tool developers who need a shared, structured catalogue of artifact locations rather than a scanner or analysis engine itself. The README describes it as community-sourced, meant to be plugged into other forensic tools as well as read directly by investigators. Started in 2014 and maintained by 90 contributors, it remains active with 24 commits in the past year, though its most recent release was over six months ago.
Machine-readable YAML knowledge base of digital forensic artifacts for use as a reference or within other cyber tools.
How forensic-artifacts helps
Where does the evidence for a given operating system or application actually live on disk?
looks up the artifact definition by name and returns the file paths, registry keys, or command outputs described for that source, saved as structured YAML rather than free text
Which artifact definitions cover a piece of evidence I need for this case?
lets a definition be searched or browsed by name and description across the whole catalogue, so a practitioner can find whether a location is already documented before hunting for it manually
Can I feed a consistent artifact list into my own parser or collection script?
provides the definitions as plain YAML with a fixed specification for name, description and sources, so any tool that reads YAML can consume the same catalogue without a custom import step
Does this artifact definition still follow the project's specification?
ships Python code that validates entries against the format rules, flagging sources or fields that do not conform before they are relied on
Is this artifact still relevant, or has it been superseded?
marks entries as deprecated in the format itself, so a definition that no longer applies is labeled rather than silently left in the catalogue
Which operating systems or platforms does a given artifact apply to?
records supported operating system per definition, so a lookup can be scoped to the systems actually in scope for an investigation
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
|---|
Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for forensic-artifacts, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail forensic-artifacts puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in ForensicArtifacts/artifacts, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 5 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 67% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 34 days first maintainer reply 34 days
- Open backlog 39 of 101 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 39
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,273
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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