If you are doing memory forensics using Volatility, maybe you have noticed that one of the disadvantages that you can’t do a live analysis. If you need to do live memory forensics, then Rekall is your best friend.

Rekall can be obtained from the following location:

https://github.com/google/rekall/releases

Rekall supports the following Operation systems:

• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 and 3
• Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 0 and 1
• Microsoft Windows 8 and 8.1
• Microsoft Windows 10
• Linux Kernels 2.6.24 to most recent.
• OSX 10.7-10.12.x.

For this diary, I am going to use Rekall for Windows. The installation is straightforward.

Rekall needs to be run as administrator to perform the live analysis. Unfortunately, sometimes you need to specify the profile to do the analysis. To find the right profile type the following command inside the Rekall console:

version_scan name_regex="krnl"

 

Now locate the guid for ntkrnlmp.pdb

In my case its “5B396742883C48D0AB74C7374DEEE9161”

Now exit from rekall console by typing:

quit

 

Now run rekall again with the following command (notice that I have provided the guid in the command):

rekal live --profile=nt/GUID/5B396742883C48D0AB74C7374DEEE9161

 

Now we can play with rekall , here are some examples,

 

To list the available plugins

dir(plugins)

List the running process:

pslist

 

To list the process tree:

pstree

To view the services and save the output to services.txt

services(output="services.txt")