[1] The project began in 2008 as an environment to foster digital forensics and incidence response (DFIR), with several related tools pre-installed.

[2] CAINE is a professional open source forensic platform that integrates software tools as modules along with powerful scripts in a graphical interface environment.

[3][4] CAINE is a live Linux distribution so it can be booted from removable media (flash drive) or from an optical disk and run in memory.

The CAINE Linux distribution has numerous software applications, scripts and libraries that can be used in a graphical or command line environment to perform forensic tasks.

[8] File system image analysis of NTFS, FAT/ExFAT, Ext2, Ext3, HFS and ISO 9660 is possible via command line and through the graphic desktop.