Robust Linux memory acquisition with minimal target impact

Software based Memory acquisition on modern systems typically requires the insertion of a kernel module into the running kernel. On Linux, kernel modules must be compiled against the exact version of kernel headers and the exact kernel configuration used to build the currently executing kernel. This makes Linux memory acquisition significantly more complex in practice, than on other platforms due to the number of variations of kernel versions and configurations, especially when responding to incidents. The Linux kernel maintains a checksum of kernel version and will generally refuse to load a module which was compiled against a different kernel version. Although there are some techniques to override this check, there is an inherent danger leading to an unstable kernel and possible kernel crashes. This paper presents a novel technique to safely load a pre-compiled kernel module for acquisition on a wide range of Linux kernel versions and configuration. Our technique injects a minimal acquisition module (parasite) into another valid kernel module (host) already found on the target system. The resulting combined module is then relinked in such a way as to grant code execution and control over vital data structures to the acquisition code, whilst the host module remains dormant during runtime.