BodySnatcher: Towards reliable volatile memory acquisition by software

Recently there has been a surge in interest in memory forensics: the acquisition and analysis of the contents of physical memory obtained from live hosts. The emergence of kernel level rootkits, anti-forensics, and the threat of subversion that they pose threatens to undermine the reliability of such memory images and digital evidence in general. In this paper we propose a method of acquiring the contents of volatile memory from arbitrary operating systems in a manner that provides point in time atomic snapshots of the host OS volatile memory. Additionally the method is more resistant to subversion due to its reduced attack surface. Our method is to inject an independent, acquisition specific OS into the potentially subverted host OS kernel, snatching full control of the host's hardware. We describe an implementation of this proposal, which we call BodySnatcher, which has demonstrated proof of concept by acquiring memory from Windows 2000 operating systems.