ADF Triage-G2 vs CAINE

ADF Triage-G2 is digital forensic triage software for computer and media exploitation during sensitive site exploitation. ADF describes that work as supporting military and intelligence needs such as counterterrorism, force protection, and national security. Designed for non-technical operators, it uses a two-step process to scan devices, extract material, and analyze intelligence. It can be deployed on a small USB key for field reconnaissance. Rosoka entity extraction and multilingual translation are standard; ADF says its text analytics processes documents in 230+ languages to identify entities and locations in unstructured documents. The software handles evidence from computers, iOS and Android devices, USB devices, storage media, documents, emails, text communications, and digital images. Listed export formats are PDF, VICS, HTML, and CSV. Boot-mode tools do not change disks, according to ADF; live scans avoid changing file timestamps but leave traces, which stealth mode makes harder to locate. Pricing is available on request, with one-year or three-year subscription licenses that include support, maintenance, and upgrades during the term. There is no free plan; a free 30-day evaluation is available to qualified organizations.

CAINE is a free Italian GNU/Linux live distribution for digital forensics. It combines existing forensic programs as modules behind a graphical interface and is intended to support investigators through four investigation phases. The current listed download is CAINE 14.0 “LIGHTSTREAM,” dated 24/Mar/2025. That release sets block devices to read-only by default, while UnBlock can change the setting. rbfstab supports read-only mounting, and Mounter provides graphical mounting and unmounting. Included analysis utilities include Autopsy, FTK Imager, PhotoRec, TestDisk, hashcat, and memory-analysis scripts, alongside Windows incident-response tools such as Nirsoft utilities, WinAudit, FTK Imager, and USB Write Protector. CAINE supports disk imaging, memory and mobile forensics, and sources including raw/dd images, EnCase files, databases, internet histories, and Windows registries. Reports can be exported as raw/dd, EnCase, or text. The ISO is approximately 4000 MB, and third-party software keeps its own licenses.