Filo-Go v0.5.1 Released

🚀 Filo-Go v0.5.1

Today I'm happy to announce the first stable release:

The goal of Filo-Go is to provide a unified forensic analysis platform that can replace workflows involving multiple tools such as Binwalk, file, ExifTool, and strings.

Highlights

• REST API server
• Docker support
• Interactive HTML reports
• Streaming analysis pipeline
• Analysis result caching
• Plugin system
• MCP integration
• YARA support
• Firmware analysis capabilities
• Security hardening improvements

Quality Improvements

This release also focuses heavily on engineering quality:

• 79.6% test coverage
• Zero lint issues
• GitHub Actions CI/CD
• Apache 2.0 licensing
• Improved documentation and benchmarking

Real Performance Benchmarks

One lesson learned during development is that benchmark claims must be measurable and reproducible.

Earlier benchmark experiments produced unrealistic numbers, so I rebuilt the benchmarking process and published reproducible results based on actual workloads.

Current measured results against Binwalk:

Benchmark scripts and raw results are included in the repository for verification.

Known Limitations

Not every operation is faster.

For example:

• filo strings is still slower than GNU strings on large inputs.
• filo hash is slightly slower than dedicated hash utilities.

I'm intentionally documenting these tradeoffs because performance claims without context are not useful.

What's Next?

Future work includes:

• Additional forensic modules
• Expanded firmware support
• More analysis formats
• Better reporting capabilities
• Continued performance optimization

Building Filo-Go has been one of the most educational projects I've worked on as a cybersecurity student, touching everything from file formats and malware analysis to API design, testing, benchmarking, and systems programming.

Repository: filo-go

Feedback, bug reports, and contributions are welcome.