A digital forensics expert needs to extract metadata from image files as part of an investigation. Which of the following tools is designed to read and write metadata for a wide variety of file formats?

Exiftool is a powerful and widely-used tool specifically designed for reading, writing, and editing metadata within a broad range of file formats, including images. It supports various metadata formats such as EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and many others, making it an ideal choice for digital forensics experts who need to handle metadata extraction effectively.

By utilizing Exiftool, a forensics expert can not only retrieve critical information embedded in image files, such as camera settings, timestamps, and geolocation data, but can also manipulate this metadata if necessary for the investigation. Its versatility and robustness in dealing with numerous formats allow it to stand out for tasks related to digital evidence management.

In contrast, other tools mentioned do not have the same capability to manage metadata across diverse file formats. While a statically linked library might provide programming functionality for using other tools, it does not serve the direct purpose of reading and writing metadata. Volatility is a memory forensics framework, primarily focused on analyzing volatile memory dumps, rather than handling file metadata. Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools aimed at wireless security assessments, specifically for cracking WEP and WPA/WPA2 encryption keys; it does not pertain to metadata manipulation at all. This distinction underscores Exif