Research on Mac OS X Physical Memory Analysis

Physical memory analysis has been an issue on a field of live forensic analysis in digital forensics until now. It is very useful to make the result of analysis more reliable, because record of user behavior and data can be founded on physical memory although process is hided. But most memory analysis focuses on windows based system. Because the diversity of target system to be analyzed rises up, it is very important to analyze physical memory based on other OS, not Windows. Mac OS X, has second market share in Operating System, is operated by loading kernel image to physical memory area. In this paper, We propose a methodology for physical memory analysis on Mac OS X using symbol information in kernel image, and acquire a process information, mounted device information, kernel information, kernel extensions(eg. KEXT) and system call entry for detecting system call hooking. In additional to the methodology, we prove that physical memory analysis is very useful though experimental study.