Extracting windows registry information from physical memory

Windows registry from physical memory contains lots of important information that are of potential evidential value in forensic analysis. In this paper, a method of extracting windows registry information from physical memory has been proposed. The algorithm for extracting the hive files from memory is presented and mainly composed of the following steps: judging the version of operating system, acquiring the current running process, locating the _HANDLE_TABLE of the process, enumerating the handles of the process, and finding the required hive files. The method is proved to be effective in extracting hive files from memory dumps imaged from Window XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. How to make use of the registry data in memory is also given.

[1]  Mark Russinovich,et al.  Windows® Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition , 2009 .

[2]  Timothy D. Morgan.  Recovering deleted data from the Windows registry , 2008 .

[3]  Lianhai Wang,et al.  Windows Memory Analysis Based on KPCR , 2009, 2009 Fifth International Conference on Information Assurance and Security.

[4]  Mourad Debbabi,et al.  Extraction of forensically sensitive information from windows physical memory , 2009, Digit. Investig..

[5]  Brendan Dolan-Gavitt,et al.  Forensic analysis of the Windows registry in memory , 2008, Digit. Investig..

[6]  Tianjie Cao,et al.  Collecting Sensitive Information from Windows Physical Memory , 2009, J. Comput..

[7]  Hong Ding,et al.  Carving the Windows Registry Files Based on the Internal Structure , 2009, 2009 First International Conference on Information Science and Engineering.

[8]  Harlan Carvey.  The Windows Registry as a forensic resource , 2005, Digit. Investig..

[9]  Lianhai Wang,et al.  Exploratory study on memory analysis of Windows 7 operating system , 2010, 2010 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computer Theory and Engineering(ICACTE).