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Date created: 8/20/2003
Last updated:

Technical comments: nsrl@nist.gov
Website comments: web897@nist.gov

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Welcome to the National Software Reference Library

(NSRL) Project Web Site.

This project is 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) to promote efficient and effective use of computer technology in the investigation of crimes involving computers. Numerous other sponsoring organizations from law enforcement, government, and industry are providing resources to accomplish these goals, in particular the FBI who provided the major impetus for creating the NSRL out of their ACES program.

The National Software Reference Library (NSRL) is designed to collect software from various sources and incorporate file profiles computed from this software into a Reference Data Set (RDS) of information. The RDS can be used by law enforcement, government, and industry organizations to review files on a computer 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 RDS 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. There are no hash values of illicit data, i.e. child abuse images.


The National Software Reference Library is a project in Software and Systems Division supported by The Office of Law Enforcement Standards.

NSRL RDS Annual Release Schedule

The NSRL RDS is released four times each year - in March, June, September and December - according to the schedule below.

Current Release: September 2012 RDS 2.38 containing 28,530,178 unique hash values.

Query the Hash Set Online:
There is a project called NSRLquery developed by Rob Hansen of RedJack Security LLC, which has two subprojects: nsrlsvr, which provides a server that yields NSRL RDS information on request, and nsrllookup, a simple command-line application that queries the server.
Jesse Kornblum of Kyrus has established a beta testing NSRLquery server at nsrl.kyr.us, and NSRL has been supplying release-day data to support this server.

Date Task Notes
Feb 16-28 Build and QC of master RDS Software arriving now goes in next release
Mar 1 Deliver master RDS to NIST SRD contact SRD duplicates and mails the RDS
Apr 1 Subscribers should receive RDS in mail  
Apr 28 ISO images of RDS available as free downloads  
May 16-28 Build and QC of master RDS Software arriving now goes in next release
Jun 1 Deliver master RDS to NIST SRD contact SRD duplicates and mails the RDS
Jul 1 Subscribers should receive RDS in mail  
Jul 28 ISO images of RDS available as free downloads  
Aug 16-28 Build and QC of master RDS Software arriving now goes in next release
Sep 1 Deliver master RDS to NIST SRD contact SRD duplicates and mails the RDS
Oct 1 Subscribers should receive RDS in mail  
Oct 28 ISO images of RDS available as free downloads  
Nov 16-28 Build and QC of master RDS Software arriving now goes in next release
Dec 1 Deliver master RDS to NIST SRD contact SRD duplicates and mails the RDS
Jan 1 Subscribers should receive RDS in mail  
Jan 28 ISO images of RDS available as free downloads