Challenges in Carving Registry Hives from Memory
As I mentioned last week, I moved to a new apartment this week, and as a result I didn't have a lot of time to do any serious work. Still, I didn't want to let the entire week go to waste, so I decided to try and tackle a problem that I thought would be relatively simple: extracting a copy of the binary registry hives out of memory. As it turned out, this was actually a bit more difficult than I expected, and I'll have to get back to the problem at a later date, but I thought in the meantime I'd write about what steps I took, where I ran into trouble, and describe the approach I hope to take when I revisit the issue. There were several reasons to suspect that one might find at least partial copies of the registry in memory: the registry stores all of the configuration data for the Windows operating system, and its contents are referred to and updated quite often during normal operation (let Sysinternals' Regmon run for few minutes and look at the output if you hav...