With the growth of virtualization and cloud computing, more and more forensic investigations rely on being able to perform live forensics on a virtual machine using virtual machine introspection (VMI). Inspecting a virtual machine through its hypervisor enables investigation without risking contamination of the evidence, crashing the computer, etc. To further access to these techniques for the investigator/researcher we have developed a new VMI monitoring language. This language is based on a review of the most commonly used VMI-techniques to date, and it enables the user to monitor the virtual machine's memory, events and data streams. A prototype implementation of our monitoring system was implemented in KVM, though implementation on any hypervisor that uses the common x86 virtualization hardware assistance support should be straightforward. Our prototype outperforms the proprietary VMWare VProbes in many cases, with a maximum performance loss of 18% for a realistic test case, which we consider acceptable. Our implementation is freely available under a liberal software distribution license.


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    Title :

    VMI-PL : A monitoring language for virtual platforms using virtual machine introspection


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2014-01-01


    Remarks:

    Local oai:bth.se:forskinfo0A0A78B4664692A1C1257D6D003DE867



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629