MEMORY FORENSIC: ACQUISITION AND ANALYSIS OF MEMORY AND ITS TOOLS COMPARISON

Abstract

The enhancement of technology has led to a considerable amount of growth in number of cases pertaining to cyber-crime and has raised an enormous challenge to tackle it effectively.  There are various cyber forensic techniques and tools used to recover data from the devices to tackle cyber-crime. Present research paper focuses on performing memory forensic and analyzes the memory which contains many pieces of information relevant to forensic investigation, such as username, password, cryptographic keys, deleted files, deleted logs, running processes; that can be helpful to investigate the cyber-crime pining down the accused. The three main steps followed in memory forensic are acquiring, analyzing and recovering. Recovery of the evidences of crime from the volatile memory can be possible with the knowledge of different tools and techniques used in memory forensic.  However, it is always tough to analyze volatile memory as it stays for a very short period. Not all tools can be used for memory forensic in every situation and therefore, it is important to have the knowledge of tools before applying to solve a particular cyber-crime. It is yet to establish on using a single tool for complete investigation, however, most of the tools used are successful in providing reasonable evidences. The present research paper provides an insight on analyzing the memory that stores relevant data, collection of evidences from the device(s), extraction of essential data using different memory forensic tools, tools useful for various purposes and the best suited tool for a particular situation.