Tools memory imaging
Memory Imaging Tools
x86 Hardware
WindowsSCOPE CaptureGUARD PCIe card (commercial) - desktops, servers Publicly available, supports all Windows OS; windd and other formats.
CaptureGUARD Gateway performs DRAM acquisition even on locked computers
WindowsSCOPE CaptureGUARD ExpressCard (commercial) - laptop applications Publicly available, supports all Windows OS; windd and other formats.
CaptureGUARD Gateway performs DRAM acquisition even on locked computers
Tribble PCI Card (research project)
Windows Software
There are many Windows memory acquisition tools. Most of them will not work on Windows Vista or 7, as user programs have been denied access to the \Device\Physicalmemory object starting in Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows Vista. Modern tools acquire physical memory by first installing a device driver, so administrative privileges are needed.
We have edited this list so that it only includes current tools:
Belkasoft Live RAM Caputer This free forensic tool, unlike many others, works in kernel-mode, which allows bypassing proactive anti-debugging protection used by many modern applications such as online games and intrusion detection systems. Kernel-mode operation yields more reliable results compared to user-mode tools.
Designed specifically for computer forensics. Fully portable, runs off a flash drive, produces uncompressed raw binary output of the computer’s volatile memory. Includes kernel-mode drivers for all Windows OS’es including XP, Vista, 7, 8, 2003 and 2008 Server. 32 and 64-bit drivers are included.
Can capture, analyze, graph in depth physical and virtual memory codes and structures
Proprietary and standard formats (windd), snapshot repository, snapshot comparison
All Windows OSs (Xp, Vista, 7), 32-bit and 64-bit supported
Phantom Probe USB based fetch
CaptureGUARD PCIe card and ExpressCard for hardware-assisted DRAM acquisition
CaptureGUARD Gateway for hardware-assisted DRAM acquisition of locked computers
allows live memory analysis of Windows computers from Android phones and tablets
winen.exe (Guidance Software - included with Encase 6.11 and higher) included on Helix.
Winen.exe - RAM Imaging Tool Included in New Version of Encase
Mdd (ManTech) https://sourceforge.net/projects/mdd
MANDIANT Memoryze Can capture and analyze memory. Supports reading dumps (raw/dd format) from other tools.
Moonsols: DumpIt This utility is used to generate a physical memory dump of Windows machines. It works with both x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) machines.
The raw memory dump is generated in the current directory, only a confirmation question is prompted before starting.
Perfect to deploy the executable on USB keys, for quick incident responses needs.
FTK Imager can acquire live memory and paging file on 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
OSForensics can acquire live memory on 32-bit and 64-bit systems. A dump of an individual process's memory space or physical memory dump can be done. Output can be a straight dump or a Microsoft crash dump file, for use with Micrsoft's WinDbg debugger.
WinPmem WinPmem is a free, actively developed, opensource forensic memory acquisition tool for Windows. It supports Windows XP to Windows 8, both 32 and 64 bit architectures. It can produce raw dumps as well as dumps in crashdump format (for analysis with Volatility or windbg). It supports output to STDOUT for piping the dump through tools like netcat or ssh. WinPmem can be used together with the Volatility Technology Preview to analyse a live windows system for live response and triaging.
Linux
LiME Linux Memory Extractor (LiME) is a Loadable Kernel Module (LKM), which allows the acquisition of volatile memory from Linux and Linux-based devices, such as those powered by Android. The tool supports dumping memory either to the file system of the device or over the network.
Linux Memory Grabber by Hal Pomeranz a tool to create Linux Volatility profiles and dump memory (using LiME) from an USB Key, without installation on local HDD. Very useful
/dev/crash On Red Hat systems (and those running related distros such as Fedora or CentOS), the crash driver can be loaded to create pseudo-device /dev/crash for raw physical memory access (via command "modprobe crash"). This module can also be compiled for other Linux distributions with minor effort (see, for example, http://gleeda.blogspot.com/2009/08/devcrash-driver.html). When the crash driver is modified, compiled, and loaded on other systems, the resulting memory access device is not safe to image in its entirety. Care must be taken to avoid addresses that are not RAM-backed. On Linux, /proc/iomem exposes the correct address ranges to image, marked with "System RAM".
/dev/mem On older Linux systems, the program dd can be used to read the contents of physical memory from the device file /dev/mem. On recent Linux systems, however, /dev/mem provides access only to a restricted range of addresses, rather than the full physical memory of a system. On other systems it may not be available at all. Throughout the 2.6 series of the Linux kernel, the trend was to reduce direct access to memory via pseudo-device files. See, for example, the message accompanying this patch.
Second Look: Linux Memory Forensics This commercial memory forensics product ships with a modified version of the crash driver and a script for safely dumping memory using the original or modified driver on any given Linux system.
fmem fmem is kernel module that creates device /dev/fmem, similar to /dev/mem but without limitations. This device (physical RAM) can be copied using dd or other tool. Works on 2.6 Linux kernels. Under GNU GPL.
lmap and pmem pmem is a loadable kernel module that exposes /dev/pmem. lmap allows to inject the pmem functionality into existing kernel modules to bypass having to build a pmem kernel module for every different kernel version.
Mac OS X
Goldfish Goldfish is a Mac OS X live forensic tool. Its main purpose is to provide an easy to use interface to dump the system RAM of a target machine via a Firewire connection. It then automatically extracts the current user login password and any open AOL Instant Messenger conversation fragments that may be available.
OSXPMem The OSX Memory Imager is an open source tool to acquire physical memory on an Intel based Mac. The imager supports multiple output formats, at the moment these are Mach-O, ELF and zero-padded RAW.
Virtual
Qemu Qemu allows you to dump the memory of a running image using pmemsave.
e.g. pmemsave 0 0x20000000 /tmp/dumpfile
Xen Xen allows you to live dump the memory of a guest domain using the dump-core command.
You can list the available machines to find the host machine you care about using xm list and see the configuration.
Dumping is a matter of sudo xm dump-core -L /tmp/dump-core-6 6
VMWare ESXi One way to make a memory dump on ESXi is to make a snapshot of the running instance. This can be done using one of the
client side tools for ESXi, but also on the ESXi ssh shell.
To make a snapshot on the ESXi ssh shell the following commands can be used:
- vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
- vim-cmd vmsvc/get.summary vmid | grep [some identity e.g. ip address if name is not known]
- vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create vmid [snapshotName] [snapshotDescription] [includeMemory (thus 1)] [quiesced]
the .vmsn file can be copied from the ESXi using e.g. scp
volatility can be used to convert the memdump into a raw dump. In my experience it is not possible to use volatility directly on the non-converted dump.