National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

A computer forensics project supported by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ), federal, state, and local law enforcement, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) , The National Software Reference Library (NSRL) was designed to collect software from various sources and includes a Reference Data Set (RDS) of information.

The RDS can be used for review of files on computers by matching file profiles in the RDS. This will help alleviate much of the effort involved in determining which files are important as evidence on computers or file systems that have been seized as part of criminal investigations. The list is a collection of digital signatures of known, traceable software applications. There are application hash values in the hash set which may be considered malicious, i.e. steganography tools and hacking scripts.