THIS IS A DRAFT! THE CAMPAIGN WILL LIKELY START IN A FEW DAYS. PLEASE STAY TUNED!
This is a crowdfunding campaign for buying out Flash-Extractor from Soft-Center and making it OpenSource/OpenHardware. When the first campaign is successful, we want to develop new NAND readers, and produce them.
What is Flash Extractor?
Flash Extractor is/was one of the three leading commercial tools for NAND Flash data recovery, which is able to recover data from USB pendrives, SD cards, MicroSD cards and various other formfactors.
Why do we want to make Flash Extractor OpenSource?
Soft-Center has decided to stop the development of Flash-Extractor, and we believe that the OpenSource community is capable to continue to develop, maintain and improve a Flash reader. Two examples are the academic researchers in the fields of SSD algorithm research and forensics that are currently excluded from the development of the commercial tools and can therefore not contribute to the research necessary for data recovery.
Our goals for the future
The following is a list of ideas that we would like to work on and achieve in the future. We currently believe that they are doable, but we might find out that things need a different approach.
LDPC support
we recently invented a solution to recover the LDPC parameters from a flash controller to be able to decode the ECC areas on modern flash chips. We have published the solution: https://github.com/thesourcerer8/drresearch/.
We want to implement this method into FE as soon as FE becomes OpenSource, and document it publically so that other vendors can implement it too. (So if you want to see LDPC support in your favourite other commercial tool, pledge to this campaign might help to speed that up)
Support for several different kinds of readers
We want to open up FE to support several new kinds of readers:
We want to continue supporting the classic FE readers for existing FE customers
We want to build very cheap readers based on e.g. Raspberry Pi likely with a slower speed, targeted at researchers, academic users, (and perhaps even adding additional cheaper channels for DR specialists)
We want to build readers similar to the existing readers, targeted at DR professionals, the goal there is to improve the signal integrity and support higher speeds over existing solutions and to add DQS support for better Read-Retry support for newer chips, while slightly lowering costs. One idea we have at the moment is to add Ethernet/Wifi support in addition to the USB interface, to make recovery of any reader easier manageable from any of your machines.
We are thinking about potentially designing high-end readers with the support for advanced Read-Retry and on-the-fly ECC decoding for professional handling of urgent cases.
We want to improve FE to make it easier to use, while making it even more poweful. We are currently trying several new design concepts for better visualization of the data (think Google Earth: ) and better ways to interact with the tool. We believe that we have experts in our team that can develop algorithms to have some parts of the recovery process better automated than what you are currently used to in the commercial tools, like e.g. automatic XOR key recovery.
SSD support
We did a lot of research on SSDs and want to add FTL(FlashTranslationLayer) and AES decryption support to FE. We also want to add 8CE (or even more, ONFI has standardized up to 32CE already!) to the readers, and support more BGA footprints like BGA316 with new adapters.
What is the current state of the project?
We currently have developed 2 OpenSource NAND flash controllers in Verilog and VHDL. We have recently ported one of them from VHDL to Verilog, and are currently testing them in simulations and soon on FPGAs.
We expect that the controller core from the FE reader will be the third option then.
We are currently in the selection process for FPGAs for the new readers, but since we do not have the design files and IP cores from the FE reader yet, we can only finalize the designs for the new readers afterwards.
Since a lot of the ideas we have are depending on the FE technology we want to only collect the money first to buy the FE technology from Soft-Center. For this we have an offer from Soft-Center to release all the technology. In the first step we are only collecting your pledges, no money. Only when we have enough pledges to buy FE, Soft-Center will start collecting the money, and when the money has arrived, Soft-Center will release the technology. We will publish the technology on GitHub, and will release a new FE version which will be a full and unlimited version of the FE software with license restrictions removed as soon as possible.
Afterwards we will continue maintaining it (like we are currently doing for HDDSUPERCLONE) and improving FE, but since we do not have access to the FE technology yet, we cannot provide any definitive plans or timelines beyond that yet. We have outlined the ideas we have at the moment above, but we cannot guarantee that they will be implemented. But as soon as FE has been made OpenSource, anyone can help to implement them.
To estimate the demand for the new readers, we are setting up a seperate crowdfunding campaign, which depends on this campaign to be successfully finished, to get a good idea which kinds of readers you can/want to afford. So this is purely market research at the moment, we will not actually collect the money for the readers now, but we will use the information to design the readers you want, and will likely start a crowdfunding campaign a few months after FE has been made opensource, when the readers are fully developed, and contact you then, whether you want to still want the product then.
Our crowdfunding platform allows you to decide yourself for the maximum price you are willing to pay. The more you can offer the faster the campaign can be successful and the faster we can reach the goals.
If the crowdfunding campaign is successful to cover the costs, we will calculate a "campaign price". Everyone who offered to pay less than the campaign price will only pay as much as he/she offered. Everyone who offered to pay more than the campaign price will only pay the campaign price. So the more people will join the campaign, the cheaper it can be for everyone. The status tab on the right side will show the estimated campaign price. If the cost structure changes unexpectedly, the final campaign price will be adapted.
Risks:
If the time runs out and the campaign does not raise enough money, then we will not collect the money, we will not free Flash Extractor, and the Flash Extractor technology will be gone.
Since this campaign is currently not validating credit cards, it could be that the people who pledge will not pay up, so that the campaign might fail, even though it seemed to succeed. Usually more than 90% of the backers pay up. In that case we will remove those pledges from the campaign, recalculate the campaign-price and ask the other backers to pay up.
UPDATES:
The crowdfunding campaign will end on 31th November 2023, or earlier if it is successful earlier.