Memory Forensics Analysis for Investigation of Online Crime - A Review

Advancement of technology not only coercing our society to depend on technology but it also attracting criminals towards this technical world or cyberspace, and also providing the criminals with adequate number of tools and techniques for committing serious crimes as well as to hide their identity or clearing their tracks (criminal activities). Moreover, due to worldwide acceptance of digital forensics for investigation, criminals are constantly using technology which avoids storing any evidences in permanent storage media and deploying their attack through volatile memory. Therefore, memory forensics is accepted as part of incident response procedure for investigation and it is evolving constantly. In this study, we surveyed various memory acquisition tools and techniques giving emphasis on online crimes where live CD/USB, portable browsers, virtualization, The Onion Router (Tor) is involved. This paper also pointed out the various contributions by researcher and academician for the enhancement of memory forensics analysis. The objective was to study the existing growth of the memory forensics framework for investigation of cases involving dark web and anonymous network and find out the existing challenges in investigation of such cases.