FASTDD: An Open Source Forensic Imaging Tool

Nowadays electronic devices are ubiquitous and their storage capacity has steadily been growing over time. It is not surprising that acquiring a copy of the storage of such devices has become a crucial task in digital forensics, resulting in the development of fast and still reliable tools. In this work we introduce fastdd, a new disk imaging tool that achieves unmatched performance while having fewer resource requirements than the currently available tools and being designed to be easily extendable. After reviewing the existing programs for disk image acquisition, we compare their functionalities and performance to fastdd, demonstrating that our tool is fast, lightweight, hence suitable to be used in embedded devices.