How to acquire Linux memory images using without a driver
Posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2018 at 5:52 am.
Written by blschatz
For a long time now, operating systems such as Windows and MacOS have prevented user space applications from accessing the raw physical memory of the machine. Physical acquisition and virtualisation approaches aside, this has led the field to require the use of kernel drivers to export physical ram for acquisition. In the linux realm, Joe Sylve’s LiME is the go-to for many. It appears not widely known that on Linux x64, acquisition of physical memory is possible without using a driver such as LiME. The prerequisite here is that /proc/kcore is enabled, which fortunately is widely the case: Ubuntu ships with it enabled by default, as does Redhat. On x64 the full physical address space is mapped into the kernel address space, and /proc/kcore exports this as a part of its virtual ELF file view.[…]
Firmware Security 