Memory Forensics

Gathering and analyzing memory images

Gathering Memory

There are a handful of different tools which can be used to gather memory. Some of these include:

• winpmem (https://github.com/Velocidex/WinPmem)

  • winpmem_mini_x64.exe physmem.raw

• procdump (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump)

• FTK Imager

IMPORTANT WHEN GATHERING MEMORY

Always make sure that the OS information is gathered in conjuction with the image information! This can be achieved on windows machines with the ver command. After, we can grep for the version information through the vol.py --info output.

Analyzing Memory

Volatility is one of the most common tools to use in memory investigations.

How to Use Volatility for Memory Forensics and Analysis | Varonis

Keep in mind that the current release of Volatility still uses Python 2, and the newest version of volatility is still in beta.

Volatility Usage

./vol.py -f [image file] --profile [profile] [plugin]

In order to use this effectively, we need to know the profile of the memory image before we can analyze it properly. This is because each separate version of OS, including minor releases, can have drastically different locations in memory where objects are stored.

The following env vars can be set to speed up the usage of Volatility and prevent having to type in the file location and profile info for each run.

• VOLATILITY_LOCATION

• VOLATILITY_PROFILE

Common Plugins

Plugin	Purpose
-h [plugin]	Learn plugin options for individual plugin
--info	List all available plugins
imageinfo	Attempt to determine OS of image (slow)
kdbgscan	Attempt to determine OS of image (slow)
pslist	List system processes
pstree	List processes in a tree format, showing parents and relationships
psscan	Search for potentially hidden processes
netscan	Search for active and listening sockets
userassist	Track program usage from GUI
cmdline	Identify command line for processes which were running
printkey	Print the output of a registry key
svcscan	List services on the system
dlllist	List DLLs for each process

References

How to Use Volatility for Memory Forensics and Analysis | Varonis