About LEAPPs
Free, open-source digital forensics tools built by a practitioner — designed for the investigators, analysts, and examiners who use them every day.
Built Out of Necessity
LEAPPs began in 2019 as a direct response to a gap in the digital forensics toolset. Alexis Brignoni, then a Special Agent and digital forensic examiner with the FBI, was regularly encountering mobile device artifacts that commercial tools either did not support or parsed incorrectly. Rather than wait for vendors to catch up, he wrote his own parser.
That first parser grew into iLEAPP — the iOS Logs, Events and Plists Parser. iLEAPP was open-sourced on GitHub so that any examiner facing the same problem could use it, improve it, and build on it. The response from the forensics community was immediate. Examiners filed issues, submitted pull requests, and extended the tool in directions that no single person could have anticipated.
What followed was a natural expansion. Android examiners needed the same capability, so ALEAPP followed. ISP return data required its own tooling, so RLEAPP was created. Vehicle system artifacts gave rise to VLEAPP. And as the volume and complexity of parsed output grew, a dedicated viewer — LAVA — was built to make that data navigable in investigations and court proceedings.
"Tool reports are not the data. The data is the data. Validate everything that matters."
Principles That Drive the Project
Every decision in LEAPPs — what to build, how to build it, and who can use it — flows from a small set of principles that have held since the beginning.
How LEAPPs Fits in Your Workflow
LEAPPs is not a replacement for commercial tools — it's a complement. Use what works for your case.
| LEAPPs | Commercial Tools | Manual Review | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Licensed | Free |
| Source code | ✅ Open | ❌ Closed | — |
| Parser contributions | ✅ Community | ❌ Vendor only | — |
| Code auditable | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | — |
| Offline use | ✅ Yes | Varies | ✅ Yes |
| Custom artifacts | ✅ Yes | ❌ Limited | ✅ Yes |
| Interface | GUI & CLI | GUI only | — |
How We Got Here
Alexis Brignoni
Alexis Brignoni is a digital forensics practitioner, researcher, and educator. He built iLEAPP while working as a Special Agent and digital forensic examiner with the FBI, and has continued to develop the LEAPPs suite alongside his work in the field.
Alexis has presented at SANS DFIR Summit, OSDFCon, Magnet Virtual Summit, and other major DFIR conferences. He has been featured in interviews by Forensic Focus and Cellebrite, and appeared on multiple forensics podcasts. His work on mobile forensics has been incorporated into professional training programs including SANS FOR585 and IACIS Advanced Mobile Device Forensics.
He continues to actively develop and maintain the suite, and regularly hosts live coding sessions open to the community — working through new artifacts, parser patterns, and tool development in the open.
Core Contributors
The LEAPPs suite is shaped by a community of forensics practitioners who contribute parsers, research, and tooling. These contributors have had the most impact on the project.
