In the Digital Forensics ecosystem, the field of memory forensics can help uncover artifacts that canβt be found anywhere else. That can include deleted files, network connections, running processes, rootkits, code injection, fileless malware and many more.
Microsoft introduced the hibernation feature in Windows 2000, allowing systems to be powered down while preserving their volatile state. This is achieved by saving RAM contents and processor context to a file called hiberfil.sys before shutting down inside the root folder of the filesystem drive. When the computer is turned on again, the system restores the volatile state from the saved file. Hibernation files are valuable for digital forensic professionals as they store temporary data from RAM to non-volatile storage, eliminating the requirement for specialized tools on the target device.
The Hibernation file structure has evolved in time. In this blog post, we will dive into the structure of the modern Windows hibernation file and propose a new translation layer for the volatility3 framework to create a raw memory image from a hibernation file.