Back to the whiteboard: a principled approach for the assessment and design of memory forensic techniques

Today memory analysis plays a fundamental role in computer forensics and is a very active area of research. However, the field is still largely driven by custom rules and heuristics handpicked by human experts. These rules describe how to overcome the semantic gap to associate high level structures to individual bytes contained in a physical memory dump. Structures are then traversed by following pointers to other objects, and the process is repeated until the required information is located and extracted from the memory image. A fundamental problem with this approach is that we have no way to measure these heuristics to know precisely how well they work, under which circumstances, how prone they are to evasions or to errors, and how stable they are over different versions of the OS kernel. In addition, without a method to measure the quality and effectiveness of a given heuristic, it is impossible to compare one approach against the others. If a tool adopts a certain heuristic to list the sockets associated to a program, how do we know if that is the only possible way to extract this information? Maybe other, even better, solutions exist, just waiting to be "discovered" by human analysts. For this reason, we believe we need to go back to the drawing board and rethink memory forensics from its foundations. In this paper we propose a framework and a set of metrics we can use as a basis to assess existing methodologies, understandtheir characteristics and limitations, and propose new techniques in a principled way. The memory of a modern operating system is a very large and very complex network of interconnected objects. Because of this, we argue that automated algorithms, rather than human intuition, should play a fundamental role in evaluating and designing future memory forensics techniques.