Hansken Software Development Kit (SDK)
The bundling of innovation is a very important goal of the Hansken Community. To optimize the output, we make Hansken widely available to law enforcement agencies and science institutes, national and international. An essential component of the Hansken platform is the extraction engine. The extraction engine contains digital forensics knowledge, which is used to find traces in digital material.
What is the Hansken SDK?
A very useful development is the Hansken Software Development Kit (SDK). This is a powerful tool for creating extraction plugins that support new digital formats and finding and analyzing new types of traces. Hansken partners can create extensions to support their own investigations and, by sharing and re-using plugins, we can jointly boost Hansken development.
The relevance of new plugins
Our partners are constantly being confronted with new requirements in terms of data formats, information requests and algorithms to apply. As it is essential to be able to implement new functionality with short lead times, the Hansken digital forensics environment was not created as a closed system. Thanks to open interfaces, partners can also develop and link functionalities (plugins) themselves or have this done for them. This guarantees a stable development path for the core Hansken framework, while facilitating the introduction of new functions and features whenever necessary. Hansken extraction plugins are a way to leverage the knowledge and expertise of the Hansken community.
New file formats and AI
The SDK offers extensive opportunities for adding digital forensics knowledge to Hansken, including new file formats, such as new cryptocurrency wallets. We can also introduce more advanced analysis of traces by combining existing functions and (AI) technologies. A plugin has been developed for recognizing whether video material has been only stored on a device or actually played using the media player, for example. Plugins can also be used to automatically recognize the use of specific languages in documents, create speech-to-text extractions from audio files and search for specific objects in images, to name just a few options.
Documentation to develop plugins
While the SDK supports well-known programming languages, such as Java and Python, documentation is also available to create, test and implement plugins. You can find the Hansken SDK documentation and API change log on github.io. If you are interested in seeing how this facility might benefit you, then mail us via the Hansken contact form.