Extracting windows registry information from physical memory

Author

Zhang, Shuhui ; Wang, Lianhai ; Zhang, Lei

Author_Institution

Shandong Provincial Key Lab. of Comput. Network, Shandong Comput. Sci. Center, Jinan, China

Volume

2

fYear

2011

fDate

11-13 March 2011

Firstpage

85

Lastpage

89

Abstract

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.

Keywords

computer forensics; database management systems; information retrieval; operating systems (computers); storage management; user interfaces; Windows 7; Windows Vista; Windows XP; Windows registry information extraction; forensic analysis; hive file extraction; memory dumps; operating system; physical memory; registry data; Algorithm design and analysis; Data mining; Forensics; Indexes; Operating systems; Random access memory; Security; computer forensics; memory analysis; registry;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Research and Development (ICCRD), 2011 3rd International Conference on

Conference_Location

Shanghai

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-839-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICCRD.2011.5764089

Filename

5764089