Review of Live Forensic Analysis Techniques

Abstract

The widespread availability and extensive use of Internet across the world has caught attention of the criminals and digital crimes are occurring at an epidemic scale nowadays. The field of digital forensics is constantly evolving by employing new tools and technique to counter novel approaches employed by the criminals as well as to investigate the nature of the criminal activity and bring the culprits to justice. Traditionally, the static analysis was used to investigate the digital incidents. But due to advancement in technology and the fact that hackers are developing malware that do not leave footprint on the hard disk, the need for performing live digital forensic analysis in addition to the static analysis has become imperative. Live forensic analysis techniques have evolved during the last decade to analyses the memory content to get a better picture of the running application programmers, processes and active binaries. In this study, we look into different techniques of live analysis and critically review them by identifying their benefits and limitations. The key areas focused in this study pertain to virtualization, pagefile extraction and identifying the encryption keys.

Systematic Approach to Malware Analysis (SAMA)

“…The conclusion is that this phase could not respond adequately to the complexity of the current malware. The main goal of these tasks is the collection, analysis, and preservation of data from an IT machine as part of forensic processes, to make it admissible in a court of law [31,32].…”

An Empirical Study of Skype Data Retrieval from Physical Memory

“…They concluded that the use of the Windows IM can leave behind incriminating evidential material useful or critical to an investigation on the hard drive, memory and network captures. Other studies of both static media and memory forensics on Skype is reported in [16,17,18]. The general suggestion is that using data from memory dump, virtual machine created from static data can be adjusted to provide better picture of the live system at the time when the dump is made.…”

A Survey of Data Clustering Methods

“…Lastly, they identify patterns and rules for VIPs customer from the transactional data using association rules and sequential patterns and then design CRM strategies for the online shopping mall. Reference [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] outlined various software engineering and machine learning techniques in different domains.…”