Extracting windows registry information from physical memory

Windows registry from physical memory contains lots of important information that are of potential evidential value in forensic analysis. In this paper, a method of extracting windows registry information from physical memory has been proposed. The algorithm for extracting the hive files from memory is presented and mainly composed of the following steps: judging the version of operating system, acquiring the current running process, locating the _HANDLE_TABLE of the process, enumerating the handles of the process, and finding the required hive files. The method is proved to be effective in extracting hive files from memory dumps imaged from Window XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. How to make use of the registry data in memory is also given.