The Acquisition and Analysis of Random Access Memory

Mainstream operating systems (and the hardware they run on) fail to purge the contents of portions of volatile memory when that portion is no longer required for operation. Similar to how many file systems simply mark a file as deleted instead of actually purging the space that the file occupies on disk, random access memory (RAM) is commonly littered with old information in unallocated space waiting to be reused. Additionally, RAM contains constructs and caching regions that include a wealth of state-related information. The availability of this information, along with techniques to recover it, provides new methods for investigation. This article discusses the benefits and drawbacks of traditional incident response methods compared to an augmented model that includes the capture and subsequent analysis of a suspect system's memory, provides a foundation for analyzing captured memory, and provides suggestions for related work in an effort to encourage forward progress in this relatively new area of digital forensics.