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dfVFS, or Digital Forensics Virtual File System, provides read-only access to file-system objects from various storage media types and file formats. The goal of dfVFS is to provide a generic interface for accessing file-system objects, for which it uses several back-ends that provide the actual implementation of the various storage media types, volume systems and file systems.

dfVFS originates from the Plaso project and is also based on ideas from the GRR project. It was largely rewritten and made into a stand-alone project to provide more flexibility and allow other projects to make use of the VFS functionality. dfVFS originally was named PyVFS, but that name conflicted with another project.

dfVFS is currently implemented as a Python module. A packaged version can be found on the Downloads page.

Note that is project is a continuous work in progress.

For more information see:

• Getting Started
• How to build from source
• Downloads
• Roadmap

Project status

Travis-CI	AppVeyor	Codecov	PyPI

Supported Formats

The information below is based of version 20180831

Storage media types

• EWF (EWF-E01, EWF-Ex01, EWF-S01) (Requires: libewf/pyewf)
• QCOW version 1, 2, 3 (Requires: libqcow/pyqcow)
  • currently no differential image support
• Storage Media device (Requires: libsmdev/pysmdev)
• (split) Storage Media RAW (Requires: libsmraw/pysmraw)
• VHD (Requires: libvhdi/pyvhdi)
  • differential image support as of version 20160428
• VMDK (Requires: libvmdk/pyvmdk)
  • currently no differential image support

Volume systems

• Apple Partition Map (APM) (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• Apple File System (APFS) container version 2 (Requires: libfsapfs/pyfsapfs) as of dfVFS 20181124
• BitLocker Disk Encryption (BDE) (Requires: libbde/pybde)
  • AES-XTS variant not supported yet
• FileVault Disk Encryption (FVDE) (or FileVault 2) (Requires: libfvde/pyfvde)
• GPT (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• LVM (Requires: libvslvm/pyvslvm)
  • At the moment only single physical volume LVM support
• MBR (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• Volume Shadow Snapshots (VSS) (Requires: libvshadow/pyvshadow)

File systems

• Apple File System (APFS) version 2 (Requires: libfsapfs/pyfsapfs) as of dfVFS 20181124
• ext version 2, 3, 4 (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• FAT (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• HFS, HFS+, HFSX (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)
• NTFS version 3 (Requires: libtsk/pytsk or libfsntfs/pyfsntfs)
• UFS version 1, 2 (Requires: libtsk/pytsk)

TODO add more detail here regarding FAT and other supported FS

Compressed stream file types

• bzip2
• gzip
• lzma
• xz
• zlib (both zlib-DEFLATE and raw-DEFLATE)

Encoded stream file types

• base16
• base32
• base64

Encrypted stream file types

• AES-CBC, AES-CFB, AES-ECB, AES-OFB (Requires: pycrypto)
• Blowfish (Requires: pycrypto)
• DES3 (Requires: pycrypto)
• RC4 (Requires: pycrypto)

Archive file types

• cpio
• tar
• zip

Other file types

• blob stored in SQlite