apfs-forensic

A from-scratch APFS reader and a graded anomaly auditor — navigate Apple File System containers, volumes, and snapshots by path, and surface the snapshot and sealed-volume tampering, recoverable deleted records, object-map inconsistencies, and encryption state that a "clean" macOS mount is built to hide.

Status: design skeleton. The module layout and public API reflect the design at docs/plans/2026-06-21-apfs-forensic-design.md; parser bodies are stubs pending implementation.

Two crates, one workspace:

• apfs-core — the reader: NXSB container + checkpoint ring, object map, B-trees, APSB volumes, file-system records (j_key), file extents, extended attributes, snapshots, the space manager, encryption-state, and transparent decmpfs decompression over any Read + Seek source. No unsafe, no C bindings. (Imports as apfs_core.)
• apfs-forensic — the auditor: turns parsed APFS structures into severity-graded forensicnomicon::report::Findings, so an APFS volume's anomalies aggregate uniformly with the partition and container layers.

Audit an APFS container

[dependencies]
apfs-forensic = "0.1"   # pulls in apfs-core

use apfs_core::ApfsContainer;
use apfs_forensic::{audit_container, Source};
use forensicnomicon::report::Observation;

let container = ApfsContainer::open(std::fs::File::open("disk.img")?)?;
let src = Source { analyzer: "apfs-forensic".into(), scope: "APFS".into(), version: None };

for anomaly in audit_container(&container) {
    let finding = anomaly.to_finding(src.clone());
    println!("[{:?}] {} — {}", finding.severity, finding.code, finding.note);
    // e.g. [Some(High)] APFS-SEALED-VOLUME-BROKEN — im_broken_xid set at xid …
}
# Ok::<(), apfs_core::ApfsError>(())

Trust but verify

Panic-free (unsafe_code = "forbid", bounds-checked readers, range-checked length/offset/count fields, capped allocations, cycle-guarded tree walks), fuzzed (one cargo-fuzz target per parsed structure + a full-pipeline target), and validated against real artifacts — macOS itself (mount read-only and diff), The Sleuth Kit fsstat/fls/istat, fsapfsinfo (libfsapfs), and apfsck (apfsprogs). See docs/validation.md.

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