Volatility 1.3 is out!

After tons of hard work by a lot of people (including me), Volatility 1.3 has been released to the world at large. AAron has a blog post up with all the juicy details, including a list of new features. For my part, I want to take this opportunity focus on a couple new things that I think are really cool. They're mostly developer-focused, so if you have no interest in adding new capabilities to Volatility, you can skip the rest of this entry and just head over to AAron's post to see all the new modules and functionality.

The first feature I want to point out is the new plugin system. Basically, rather than creating a new module and then editing vmodules.py to add new commands to Volatility, you can now just create a class extending forensics.commands.command with the code you want to run, drop it into a file, and put that file into the memory_plugins directory, and Volatility will pick it up and see it as a new command that can be run. This means that anyone can just give out a single file and allow anyone to use it in Volatility with minimal effort.

In addition, it removes the need to manually integrate new modules from contributors into the source tree; instead, plugins can be developed and distributed independently, without relying on the Volatility devs at all. I'm hoping that this capability will allow a cool little cottage industry of plugin development to form around Volatility, in much the same way that users of EnCase currently trade EnScripts.

Second, I want to describe the new object model. Volatility 1.3 contains a new way of working with data structures in memory dumps. Each data structure found in vtypes.py can now be instantiated at a given memory address as a full-fledged Python object, and the data inside it can be accessed using standard Python syntax. No need to use read_obj again! For example, to print the size of a process located at address 0x823c87c0, we can do:

eprocess = Object('_EPROCESS', 0x823c87c0,
addr_space, None, profile=Profile())
print eprocess.VirtualSize


In addition, each structure can be given object-specific behaviors by subclassing the main Object class. For example, the _UNICODE_STRING type's Buffer member is a pointer to an unsigned short. By creating a specific _UNICODE_STRING class (as is done in memory_objects/Windows/xp_sp2.py), we can cause the Buffer member to be returned to the user as a Python string with the correct string data, automatically translated from Unicode.

Hopefully, with these new features, developing cool stuff for Volatility will be easier than ever. I know that for myself, I've found that it's now orders of magnitude faster to go from "Wouldn't it be neat if ..." to a full, working plugin. In the coming weeks, I'll be writing some posts introducing the new development features in more depth, so that as many people as possible can get involved. Remember, the power of Volatility is in its community!

Comments

Unknown said…
Very cool! Glad you are blogging again :-)

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