About Shadow and Shield

A Florida company building forensic tools for front-line environments.

Shadow and Shield is developed by daarc, Inc., a United States company based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

daarc, Inc. St. Petersburg, Florida

Company Values

What's important.

Build with Uncompromising Integrity

Trust isn't just in the technology; it's in the character of the people who create it. It's built on doing the right thing when nobody is looking, when it's not immediately beneficial to us personally. Who a person becomes on the journey is one of the ultimate measures of success. It's about being a person of your word, treating others with respect, and taking full ownership of actions and outcomes.

How it shows up
  • Take Ownership of Outcomes: Accountability means owning results, learning from mistakes, making things right, and refusing to make excuses or blame others.
  • Transparency in Process: Transparency with partners, from collaborators to customers, means providing the insight needed to make informed decisions. Technical users should understand exactly how the tools work so they can validate results and testify with confidence.
  • Clarity is Kindness: Direct, honest, and timely communication is the foundation of respect and efficiency.
  • Build Each Other Up: Credit should go where it is due, and the people around this company—collaborators, partners, and customers—should be helped toward success.
  • Do the Right Thing: Keeping your word matters. Everyone—customers, partners, and collaborators—should be treated with the same dignity and respect you would want for your own loved ones.

Treat others well, not because of what they deserve but because of who you are.

Empower the Operator

Shadow and Shield is built for professionals in high-stakes environments—from tactical operators in the field to meticulous examiners in the lab. The user belongs at the center of the product. Success means helping them perform their mission more effectively, confidently, and safely because of the tools in their hands.

How it shows up
  • Field-First Mentality: Design starts with the "Technician" profile—the user in a deployed or field environment who needs speed, simplicity, and absolute reliability under pressure.
  • Speed and Reliability are Features: In this user's world, time is critical. Performance, stability, and quick-access efficiency are product requirements, not polish.
  • Listen, Learn, Integrate: Direct engagement with practitioners keeps the work grounded in real-world problems instead of imagined workflows.

Simplify the Complex

This market is filled with powerful and often technically complex tools. Complexity creates bottlenecks in both expertise and equipment, leading to critical delays or preventing the collection of valuable data altogether. Our mission is to cut through that complexity, making powerful capabilities accessible, efficient, and user-friendly.

How it shows up
  • Intuitive by Design: Interfaces should be clean, intuitive, and built to reduce cognitive load for the operator.
  • Automation as an Imperative: Intricate and repetitive tasks should be automated where possible, freeing users to focus on analysis and decision-making, not software management.
  • Clarity Above All: Every feature, button, and workflow should answer a simple question: "Does this make the user's job easier and the results clearer?" If not, it needs to be redesigned.

Innovate with Purpose

Every new idea—from the platform approach to AI integration—must be purposefully aimed at better serving the core values of simplifying the complex and empowering the operator.

How it shows up
  • Platform-Minded Approach: The platform should adapt to varied operating environments—from a controlled lab to the back of a vehicle. This creates room for tailored, interactive options now and future opportunities for third-party integration and scalability.
  • Strategic Technology Adoption: New technologies like AI and automation should be used as tools to achieve the mission, not as buzzwords. The goal is always tangible value and efficiency for the user.
  • Embrace Continuous Learning: A rapid-learner mindset keeps the company exploring new artifacts, techniques, and technologies so the product can keep improving.

Value 05 · The Motto

Find a way…

Building something truly new means facing problems without a known solution. Technical challenges, market shifts, and unforeseen obstacles are guaranteed. This motto is a commitment to relentless resourcefulness. It's the belief that a solution always exists, even if it's not obvious, and that the job is to uncover it through creativity and persistence. This is how the long-term vision becomes real and difficult things become possible.

How it shows up
  • Challenge Assumptions: "It can't be done" is not an answer by itself. Hard problems deserve unconventional thinking and disciplined exploration.
  • Persistent Problem-Solving: Obstacles are not dead ends; they are opportunities to learn, test hypotheses, iterate, and find a path forward.
  • Bias Toward Action: Analysis should lead to motion. Experiment, build, test, and learn from the results.
  • Win with Honor: The methods for finding a way must always align with Uncompromising Integrity. Get it done, and do it the right way.
Jared Ringenberg, founder of daarc, Inc.

Founder

About the Founder

With over 14 years as a network analyst and field operations officer at the Department of Defense and National Media Exploitation Center, I have had the privilege of working with some of the most incredibly talented and mission focused people you could hope to meet. Throughout this time frame I had the opportunity to staff multiple deployments and field operations and provide cyber and digital forensic support to special operations, intelligence, and law enforcement missions around the world. It was truly an honor.

I started writing basic scripts to automate aspects of my workflow to utilize spare hardware resources that were otherwise shelved. After returning from my last rotation I decided to rebuild the concepts into a fully marketable product. Following an initial entrepreneurial venture in 2020 that provided valuable lessons in business development, I founded daarc Inc. to build this vision from the ground up.

I believe that with persistence we can figure out anything we put our minds to. I appreciate you stopping by and I'm unbelievably excited to see where this company can go.

Field Dossier

Details that separate Shadow and Shield from a tool collection.

The platform is not just a launcher for forensic utilities. These clauses highlight first-party capabilities, workflow records, and team features built into Shadow and Shield.

Clause 01

Native Go forensic imager optimized for modern CPU architecture

Clause 02

LUKS and BitLocker credential handling for encrypted evidence workflows

Clause 03

Source-drive detection, review, and read-only handling controls

Clause 04

Filename translation into English for supported export outputs

Clause 05

Tool execution history, results, hashes, and operator records

Clause 06

Team, organization, and case metadata sync with metrics and reporting

Pre-release Access

Join release updates.

Shadow and Shield is in active development and pre-release testing. Get product progress, launch details, and availability updates from daarc.