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.