When hardware meets software
Alessandro Reina, Aristide Fattori, Fabio Pagani, Lorenzo Cavallaro, Danilo Bruschi · 2012
The acquisition of volatile memory of running systems has become a prominent and essential procedure in digital forensic analysis and incident responses. In fact, unencrypted passwords, cryptographic material, text fragments and latest-generation malware may easily be protected as encrypted blobs on persistent storage, while living seamlessly in the volatile memory of a running system. Likewise, systems' run-time information, such as open network connections, open files and running processes, are by definition live entities that can only be observed by examining the volatile memory of a running system. In this context, tampering of volatile data while an acquisition is in progress or during transfer to an external trusted entity is an ongoing issue as it may irremediably invalidate the collected evidence.