AFFLIB 3.3 Released

[Simson Garfinkel]

ANNOUNCING AFFLIB 3.3

I'm happy to announce the release of AFFLIB 3.3. You can download it
from the standard location at http://www.afflib.org/

Version 3.0 is a significant upgrade to AFFLIB which introduces the
following features:

* SUPPORT FOR VMWARE, PARALLELS, APPLE DMG DISK IMAGES

* SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

================================================================
SUPPORT FOR VMWARE DISK IMAGES

AFFLIB 3.3 incorporates the disk image subsystem from the open-source
QEMU processor virtualization project. Although most of QEMU is
distributed under the GPL license, the disk subsystem is distributed
under a less restrictive license that allows any use.

As a result, forensic programs linked with AFFLIB can now
transparently access disk images stored in any of the following
formats; currently the format is specified with the indicated
extension.

So far we have only tested with VMWare .vmdk images:

* VMWare VMDK (.vmdk) (tested)

We also have the ability to add additional file types, including:
* Bochs Virtual HD Image
* cloop
* cow
* DMG
* qcow
* qcow2
* VFAT
* Parallels
* Connectix Virtual PC

Support for these will be enabled if requested.
================================================================
SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

Now that the feature set for AFFLIB is largely complete, we are
beginning to pay attention to performance issues. In particular, we
found a significant problem in versions 3.0 through 3.2 that would
significantly degrade performance of disk images larger than 1GB. This
has now been addressed.