Volatility-Advanced Memory Forensics Framework

Computer forensic is now an important field of information security, forensic has a broad field of interest. There are different courses and trainings are available to become a certified forensic expert. Tools are the essential part for forensic, there are different tools are available like PTK beside tools you can get a complete Linux distribution for digital forensic use.


Backtrack like backtrack 5 also contains a comprehensive list of forensic tools that are highly used in digital forensic, in this article i will discuss some about Volatility, as the name suggests that the term volatility may be described from volatile memory and in the field of computing RAM is a volatile memory, so volatility is volatile memory artifact extraction utility framework.


The Volatility Framework is consist of the best open source tools for forensic purposes, it is based on python.The extraction techniques are performed completely independent of the system being investigated but offer unprecedented visibility into the run-time state of the system. The framework is intended to introduce people to the techniques and complexities associated with extracting digital artifacts from volatile memory samples and provide a platform for further work into this exciting area of research.

Key Features 

• Image date and time
• Running processes
• Open network sockets
• Open network connections
• DLLs loaded for each process
• Open files for each process
• Open registry handles for each process
• A process' addressable memory
• OS kernel modules
• Mapping physical offsets to virtual addresses (strings to process)
• Virtual Address Descriptor information
• Scanning examples: processes, threads, sockets, connections,modules
• Extract executable from memory samples
• Transparently supports a variety of sample formats (ie, Crash dump, Hibernation, DD)
• Automated conversion between format 

Download

It is based on python so it does not require any special operating system, you can run it on Linux and Windows you only need python on your OS. It has been tested before and works fine on the windows XP, 7 and Vista with the latest service pack. If you want to learn more about it than follow the link.

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