Digital Forensic Analysis on Runtime Instruction Flow

Computer system’s runtime information is an essential part of the digital evidence. Current digital forensic approaches mainly focus on memory and I/O data, while the runtime instructions from processes are often ignored. We present a novel approach on runtime instruction forensic analysis and have developed a forensic system which collects instruction flow and extracts digital evidence. The system is based on whole-system emulation technique and analysts are allowed to define analysis strategy to improve analysis efficiency and reduce overhead. This forensic approach and system are applicable to binary code analysis, information retrieval and malware forensics.