UAC
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UAC is a powerful and extensible incident response tool designed for forensic investigators, security analysts, and IT professionals. It automates the collection of artifacts from a wide range of Unix-like systems, including AIX, ESXi, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, NetScaler, OpenBSD and Solaris.
./uac -a ./artifacts/files/applications/ai_tools/* -p ir_triage /tmp ./uac -a ./artifacts/files/system/macos_privilegedhelpertools.yaml /tmp ./uac -a ./artifacts/files/system/trash.yaml /tmp uac -p full /evidence/output --define CASE_ID=IR-2024-042 --define COLLECT_PATH=/var/log/app uac --system-info uac -p full /tmp/uac-output --aws-s3-presigned-url '%env:UAC_S3_URL%' --aws-s3-presigned-url-log-file '%env:UAC_S3_LOG_URL%' uac -p full /tmp/uac-output --sftp-server user@host:/evidence --sftp-ssh-option StrictHostKeyChecking=no --sftp-ssh-option IdentityFile=/path/to/key uac -p ir_triage -o uac-%hostname%-%os%-%timestamp% --output-format zip --output-password 'S3cur3P@ss!' /evidence/case42 uac -p ir_triage -H --output-format zip /evidence/case42 uac -p ir_triage --enable-modifiers --output-format zip /evidence/case42 uac --profile offline /path/to/disk_image uac -f live_response/containers/pct.yaml uac -f live_response/storage/arcstat.yaml uac -f live_response/system/pvecm.yaml ./tools/linux_procmemdump.sh <pid> # In your artifacts configuration YAML, add: # artifacts: # stderr_output_file: /path/to/custom/stderr.log # (See documentation: https://tclahr.github.io/uac-docs/collectors/#stderr_output_file) uac -f windows --ibm-cos-url 'https://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud/bucket' --ibm-cloud-api-key 'YOUR_API_KEY' uac -f macos --azure-storage-sas-url-log-file 'https://storageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/logs?sv=2021-...&sr=b&sig=...' uac --artifacts files/browsers/vivaldi.yaml --artifacts live_response/system/hidden_files.yaml -s output.tar uac --artifacts files/system/powerlog.yaml --artifacts files/system/keychain.yaml -s macos_dump.tar uac --artifacts memory_dump/avml.yaml -p full -s output.tar uac --profile ir_triage -o /tmp/triage_output uac -p full -a files/applications/discord.yaml,files/applications/telegram.yaml -o /tmp/custom_collection cat <artifact_name>.stderr uac -T user@remote-server:/path/to/collected_data
Summary
UAC is an open-source command-line tool for collecting forensic artifacts from Unix-like systems, free to use, built for incident responders and forensic analysts who need to triage a host without installing anything on it. It runs directly on the target machine — AIX, ESXi, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, NetScaler, OpenBSD, Solaris — and pulls artifacts according to YAML-defined profiles that can be customized with user-defined variables, file-size filters, and per-OS configuration overrides, then ships results to local storage or to S3 and Azure Blob via signed URLs. It sits in the 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. tooling space alongside other unix-focused triage collectors, doing the job of scripted artifact gathering that teams otherwise cobble together by hand. First committed in 2020 and maintained by 29 contributors, it has seen 71 commits and 11 releases in the past year, the latest just 24 days ago.
UAC is a powerful and extensible incident response tool designed for forensic investigators, security analysts, and IT professionals. It automates the collection of artifacts from a wide range of Unix-like systems, including AIX, ESXi, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, NetScaler, OpenBSD and Solaris.
How UAC helps
What forensic artifacts can be pulled off this machine before it gets rebuilt or shut down?
runs YAML-defined collection profiles covering process, network, filesystem, log, and application data across the Unix-like family, packaging everything into a single output for offline analysis
Which files on this host have dangerous permissions or ownership?
derives a bodyfile from the filesystem walk and extracts SUID, SGID, hidden, world-writable, group-writable, and unknown-owner files and directories into separate lists for review
Can I collect from this specific incident without hand-editing artifact definitions?
accepts variables on the command line that expand inside the YAML at collection time, so a case ID, output path, or size threshold can be set per run without touching the profile files
What is this unfamiliar Unix host I've just been dropped onto?
prints CPU, memory, hostname, and other system details up front so an investigator can pick the right artifact profile before running a full collection
Did someone leave an SSH key usable without a passphrase?
inspects collected private keys for empty passphrases and reports which public keys they correspond to, across all supported platforms
Languages
Command line
No command matches.
| option | found in | since | description |
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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 UAC, 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 UAC 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
19 entries
No entries match these filters.
- September 20261
- April 20261
- August 20251
- March 20251
- October 20241
- May 20241
- January 20241
- September 20231
- May 20231
- February 20231
- November 20221
- August 20221
- May 20221
- February 20221
- November 20211
- February 20211
- October 20201
- July 20201
- May 20201
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in tclahr/uac, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 10 −2 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −1 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 78% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 59 days first maintainer reply 11 days
- Open backlog 5 of 97 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 5
- Contributors / month 2
- Commits / month 6
- Stars 1,455
- bugs 6%
- features 22%
- questions 11%
- other 61%
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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