Responding to Living-Off-the-Land Tactics using Just-In-Time Memory Forensics (JIT-MF) for Android

Jennifer Bellizzi, Mark Vella, Christian Colombo, Julio Hernandez-Castro

2021

Abstract

Digital investigations of stealthy attacks on Android devices pose particular challenges to incident responders. Whereas consequential late detection demands accurate and comprehensive forensic timelines to reconstruct all malicious activities, reduced forensic footprints with minimal malware involvement, such as when Living-Off-the-Land (LOtL) tactics are adopted, leave investigators little evidence to work with. Volatile memory forensics can be an effective approach since app execution of any form is always bound to leave a trail of evidence in memory, even if perhaps ephemeral. Just-In-Time Memory Forensics (JIT-MF) is a recently proposed technique that describes a framework to process memory forensics on existing stock Android devices, without compromising their security by requiring them to be rooted. Within this framework, JIT-MF drivers are designed to promptly dump in-memory evidence related to app usage or misuse. In this work, we primarily introduce a conceptualized presentation of JIT-MF drivers. Subsequently, through a series of case studies involving the hijacking of widely-used messaging apps, we show that when the target apps are forensically enhanced with JIT-MF drivers, investigators can generate richer forensic timelines to support their investigation, which are on average 26% closer to ground truth.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bellizzi J., Vella M., Colombo C. and Hernandez-Castro J. (2021). Responding to Living-Off-the-Land Tactics using Just-In-Time Memory Forensics (JIT-MF) for Android. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, ISBN 978-989-758-524-1, pages 356-369. DOI: 10.5220/0010603603560369

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt21,
author={Jennifer Bellizzi and Mark Vella and Christian Colombo and Julio Hernandez-Castro},
title={Responding to Living-Off-the-Land Tactics using Just-In-Time Memory Forensics (JIT-MF) for Android},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT,},
year={2021},
pages={356-369},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010603603560369},
isbn={978-989-758-524-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT,
TI - Responding to Living-Off-the-Land Tactics using Just-In-Time Memory Forensics (JIT-MF) for Android
SN - 978-989-758-524-1
AU - Bellizzi J.
AU - Vella M.
AU - Colombo C.
AU - Hernandez-Castro J.
PY - 2021
SP - 356
EP - 369
DO - 10.5220/0010603603560369