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As I’ve stated each time I conduct FOR577, I have been an avid supporter of file integrity monitoring tools (FIM) since Gene Kim initially introduced Tripwire over three decades ago. Throughout the years, I’ve utilized several of them, including Tripwire, OSSEC, Samhain, and AIDE, to name a few. For numerous years, I relied on the fcheck Perl script (by Michael A. Gumienny) that was accessible as an apt package on Ubuntu due to its remarkable speed. Regrettably, at some point between Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 (my recollection fails me on the precise timing), it became sluggish on many of the systems I managed, to the point where instead of executing it 4-6 times daily, it occasionally took more than 24 hours to complete. And that was merely running it on chosen directories, not the entire system, as I do with tools like AIDE. Although I began writing Perl scripts in 1989, I didn’t invest time in understanding why fcheck was encountering so many difficulties. I set it aside for an extended period, but a few months back, I began contemplating it again and decided to create a similar program in Python. What I am releasing today is not entirely finished, which is why it carries the version number 0.9.0, but I have been utilizing it on about a dozen systems (Debian and Ubuntu, although it should function perfectly on any Linux with Python 3.9 or newer, likely even on older versions, though I have not personally tested it on anything earlier) for roughly six months. I still aim to incorporate a few features, including the capability to include extra configuration files such as the .local.cfg that fcheck had, instead of needing to input all the modifications into the primary configuration.

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