Stop Being the Integration Layer

Albert Hui starts from years of digital forensics and incident response work, where much of the time went into reconciling inconsistent CSV and JSON output from a long list of tools. He calls this manual reconciliation the integration layer and argues that analysts should spend that time on investigation. He points out that many strong tools are Windows-only or commercial, and that vendors often ask for case data they cannot legally share in order to reproduce bugs.

He then presents ASIN, an open-source triage program written in Rust. It is installable through Homebrew, Winget, Linux packages, or cargo, and it ingests disk images, containers, and common file systems without the user having to understand partition formats. Parsed artifacts such as the MFT, event logs, registry, prefetch, shortcut files, jump lists, and shimcache go into DuckDB, and new collections can be added incrementally to a super timeline. Hui reports that a 4.6 GB E01 CTF image scanned in just over a minute on a laptop, though he admits speed claims are self-serving. A companion mount tool exposes images as folders so existing tools keep working, and the parsers flag abnormal entries and reject malformed input.

Hui is candid that the project is early and likely still buggy. He says every crate was fuzzed and cross-checked against other tools and real data, and that the results are reproducible. His takeaway is to keep favourite tools, use the pipeline to triage and pivot, and stop acting as the integration layer when it is not needed.