Applying Forensic Tools to Virtual Machine Introspection

I've just released a technical report summarizing some work I did a couple years ago that explores how forensic memory analysis and virtual machine introspection are closely linked.

Abstract: Virtual machine introspection (VMI) has formed the basis of a number of novel approaches to security in recent years. Although the isolation provided by a virtualized environment provides improved security, software that makes use of VMI must overcome the semantic gap, reconstructing high-level state information from low-level data sources such as physical memory. The digital forensics community has likewise grappled with semantic gap problems in the field of forensic memory analysis (FMA), which seeks to extract forensically relevant information from dumps of physical memory. In this paper, we will show that work done by the forensic community is directly applicable to the VMI problem, and that by providing an interface between the two worlds, the difficulty of developing new virtualization security solutions can be significantly reduced.

You can read the full paper on SMARTech. Hopefully this will encourage others to start using great memory analysis tools like Volatility for live analysis of virtual machines!

Comments

Mefor said…
this is great as my current project is somehow related. I am not alone!
newsoft said…
Did you have a look at LiveCloudKD ? It is a practical implementation of memory reconstruction against Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines.

Popular posts from this blog

Someone’s Been Messing With My Subnormals!

Decrypting LSA Secrets

SysKey and the SAM