Container and VM Visualization for Rapid Forensic Analysis

Jordan Shropshire, Ryan Benton

Abstract: Cloud-hosted software such as virtual machines and containers are notoriously difficult to access, observe, and inspect during ongoing security events. This research describes a new, out-of-band forensic tool for rapidly analyzing cloud based software. The proposed tool renders two-dimensional visualizations of container contents and virtual machine disk images. The visualizations can be used to identify container / VM contents, pinpoint instances of embedded malware, and find modified code. The proposed new forensic tool is compared against other forensic tools in a double-blind experiment. The results confirm the utility of the proposed tool. Implications and future research directions are also described.