Digital forensics - Performing virtual primary memory extraction in cloud environments using VMI

Infrastructure as a Service and memory forensics are two subjects which have recently gained increasing amounts of attention. Combining these topics poses new challenges when performing forensic investigations. Forensics targeting virtual machines in a cloud environment is problematic since the devices are virtual, and memory forensics are a newer branch of forensics which is hard to perform and is not well documented. It is, however an area of utmost importance since virtual machines may be targets of, or participate in suspicious activity to the same extent as physical machines. Should such activity require an investigation to be conducted, some data which could be used as evidence may only be found in the primary memory. This thesis aims to further examine memory forensics in cloud environments and expand the academic field of these subjects and help cloud hosting organisations. The objective of this thesis was to study if Virtual Machine Introspection is a valid technique to acquire forensic evidence from the virtual primary memory of a virtual machine. Virtual Machine Introspection is a method of monitoring and analysing a guest via the hypervisor. In order to verify whether Virtual Machine Introspection is a valid forensic technique, the first task was to attempt extracting data from the primary memory which had been acquired using Virtual Machine Introspection. Once extracted, the integrity of the data had to be authenticated. This was done by comparing a hash sum of a file located on a guest with a hash sum of the extracted data. The experiment showed that the two hashes were an exact match. Next, the solidity of the extracted data was tested by changing the memory of a guest while acquiring the memory via Virtual Machine Introspection. This showed that the solidity is heavily compromised because memory acquisition process used was too slow. The final task was to compare Virtual Machine Introspection to acquiring the physical memory of the host. By setting up two virtual machines and examining the primary memory, data from both machines was found where as Virtual Machine Introspection only targets one machine, providing an advantage regarding privacy