A forum for reverse engineering, OS internals and malware analysis 

Forum for announcements and questions about tools and software.
 #20517  by p4r4n0id
 Sat Aug 17, 2013 9:00 pm
Actaeon is a tool to perform memory forensics of virtualization environments. Starting from a physical memory dump, Actaeon can achieve three important goals:

1) locate any Hypervisor (virtual machine monitor) that uses the Intel VT-x technology,
2) detect and analyze nested virtualization and show the relationships among different hypervisors running on the same machine
3) provide a transparent mechanism to recognize and support the address space of the virtual machines.

http://s3.eurecom.fr/tools/actaeon/
 #20531  by feryno
 Mon Aug 19, 2013 9:10 am
Hi, p4r4n0id, thank for sharing interesting link.

from the Intro page:
Actaeon adopts a hypervisor-agnostic approach, based on locating the VMCS data structure in memory.
I just wonder how it could find VMCS if malicious hypervisor uses EPT to make its memory not present for guest and protects its memory using VT-d against DMA attacks.
Anyway it is necessary to be prepared for such possible malware.
 #20549  by p4r4n0id
 Tue Aug 20, 2013 9:25 pm
feryno wrote:Hi, p4r4n0id, thank for sharing interesting link.

from the Intro page:
Actaeon adopts a hypervisor-agnostic approach, based on locating the VMCS data structure in memory.
I just wonder how it could find VMCS if malicious hypervisor uses EPT to make its memory not present for guest and protects its memory using VT-d against DMA attacks.
Anyway it is necessary to be prepared for such possible malware.
Good point! no idea :)