NIJ Electronic Crime Technology Center of Excellence
Law Enforcement Search String Assistant

 

Powered by:
Rhode Island Digital Forensics Center


Sponsored by:
NIJ

Law Enforcement Search String Assistant

The Law Enforcement Search String Assistant (LESSA) is a resource to digital forensics investigators who perform keyword searches for evidence.

Share keyword lists

Keyword lists for drugs, child porn, fraud, and most other criminal investigations are stored here. Find typical words, slang, words from foreign languages, etc.

  • Browse keywords by crime category.
  • Search for keywords stored here using the LESSA Search Engine.
  • Download keywords to import into EnCase, FTK, and other forensics tools.
  • Share your keywords with others by adding them to the lists.
  • Vote on the effectiveness of keywords to help establish which keywords work best
  • Comment on keywords to guide others in their use.

Generate Regular (GREP) Expressions

EnCase, FTK, X-Ways and other forensic tools allow searching for patterns, such as “all valid credit card numbers” or “all email addresses” using regular expressions.

  • Use LESSA’s RegEx Generator to generate regular expressions for EnCase and/or FTK from a simple, intuitive interface.
  • Have LESSA’s RegEx Generator generate sample strings that match your regular expression to see if your expression produces expected results.
  • Test regular expressions on sample text in LESSA’s RegEx Tester to see what text your expression matches before committing to a time-consuming search in your forensic tool.

LESSA was developed at the University of Rhode Island’s Digital Forensics Center under a grant from the National Institute of Justice’s Electronic Crime Program. It is supported by the NIJ’s Electronic Crime Technology Center of Excellence.