Automatically Generating Memory Forensic Tools
Now that the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy program has finally been posted , I can describe some research I've been working on for the past year and a half related to virtual machine introspection (VMI) and memory forensics. A well-known problem with VMI and memory forensics is the semantic gap -- basically, the kind of information you want out of a memory image or a running VM is high level information (what processes are running, what files are open, and so on) but what you get is a big bunch of uninterpreted bytes (i.e., a view of physical memory). Bridging this gap is what tools like Volatility were built to do, and they do it well. However, building a tool like Volatility takes a lot of work and a lot of knowledge about the internals of the operating system you're trying to examine. With operating systems like Windows, which are closed source, this kind of knowledge comes from things like the Windows Internals book, blog posts, and good old fashioned reverse en...