One of the growth areas in digital forensics is the use of USB dongles for the licensing of software. Every single practitioner now finds themselves managing a veritable menagerie of tiny USB devices, just to enable them to carry out their day-to-day work. Of course, where dongles for core forensic software are concerned, most people will possess their own and these will be jealously guarded, with practitioners unwilling to let their prized (and in some cases, very expensive) hardware leave their sight. But what about some of the lesser used, but no less valuable, licensing dongles out there? At the moment, most labs will resound to the cries of “who’s got the X dongle? I need it to do Y”. Several minutes of frantic searching and head scratching then ensues, until someone remembers that they borrowed it to use in the imaging lab for five minutes, two weeks ago. A dongle server can solve this problem.

By Paul Andrews