[libvirt-users] converting save/dump output into physical memory image

[Eric Blake]

On 05/05/2011 11:56 AM, Andrew Tappert wrote:
> 
> A lot of people in the security community, myself included, are
> interested in memory forensics these days.  Virtualization is a natural
> fit with memory forensics because it allows one to get access to a
> guest's memory without having to introduce any extra software into the
> guest or otherwise interfere with it.  Incident responders are
> particularly interested in getting memory dumps from systems they're
> investigating.
> 
> Virsh has "save" and "dump" commands for storing the state of a guest to
> a file on disk, but memory of KVM guests doesn't get saved in the
> "standard" input format for memory forensics tools, which is a raw
> physical memory image.  (This is what you'd get via the classical "dd
> /dev/mem" approach or the contemporary equivalent using the crash
> driver; and VMware Server and Workstation produce .vmem files, which are
> such raw physical memory images, when a guest is paused or snapshotted.)

Libvirt also has the virDomainMemoryPeek API; right now, it is not
exposed by virsh, but we could add a command-line-interface for it if
that proves useful.  Does that API fit your needs any better than
converting a qemu dump image back into raw memory?

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 619 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/attachments/20110505/ca88133f/attachment.sig>