Andreas released his poolfinder tool the other day, a Perl script for locating pool tags in a memory dump. This script accompanies a paper he wrote for IMF 2006 (here's his paper from DFRWS 2006).

So, what's a pool tag, and why is it important? According to Andreas, the kernel allocates what's referred to as a "pool" of memory, so that if an application requests some memory that is less than a 4K page, rather than wasting all of that space, only what is required will be allocated. The pool tag header is a way of keeping track of this pool.

The pool header specifies the size of the pool, but there isn't any publicly available method for parsing that pool into something usable. I've used this technique to locate the contents of the Clipboard in the DFRWS 2005 memory challenge dumps, and Andreas has used this to locate network socket activity. Perhaps someone with experience in developing drivers for Windows can assist in developing a methodology for revealing the format of the various structures.

Additional Resources:
Who's using the pool?
How to use PoolMon.exe

Addendum, 23 Oct: I've made some comments to Andreas's blog, and we've gone back and forth a bit. What I'd like to try to do is identify various pool tags that are of interest to forensic examiners (ie, TCPA for network connections, clipboard, etc.). Thanks to Andreas's work, finding the pool tags and their sizes is relatively easy...deciphering them into something readable is something else entirely.