Tuesday, November 4, 2008

HFSExplorer 0.20

HFSExplorer 0.20 was just released after some intensive testing sessions.

Some highlights:
  • Support for AES-128 encrypted disk images. Crypto implementation details were derived from studying the VileFault proof-of-concept created by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Jacob Appelbaum and Christian Fromme.

  • Support for the older HFS (Mac OS Original) file system. Nobody really uses it these days, but an application named "HFSExplorer" should be able to read HFS file systems. ;>

  • Support for file system links, both hard links and soft (symbolic) links to files and directories. This makes it possible to browse Time Machine backups, as they use hard directory links extensively to create the impression of snapshots, and adds a lot to the general perception of file system completeness.

  • Extracting files can now be done "quitely", without user interaction, by setting a few runtime extract variables represented as radio buttons. This is useful for doing "batch" transfers that take a long time to finish.

  • New summary panel in the "Information" dialog for files and directories. This panel sums up some of the most important information about a file system entry. For directories, the entire directory weight is now calculated.
The next focus point will be write support. Once write support is implemented, version number will probably jump to 1.0.