Bringing Forensic Readiness to Modern Computer Firmware

2025-05-09

AI Summary

Current UEFI firmware lacks runtime memory forensics capabilities, limiting firmware-level digital investigation to boot-time or cold-boot attack scenarios. Method: This paper proposes UEberForensIcs, the first framework to embed proactive forensic capabilities directly into the UEFI firmware layer. It enables secure, real-time acquisition of firmware memory during OS runtime—bypassing traditional boot-phase dependencies—via OS-UEFI cross-layer invocation and firmware memory mapping analysis. Remote triggering and encrypted data upload are achieved by reusing the UEFI network stack. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on mainstream platforms, UEberForensIcs achieves end-to-end forensic latency under 200 ms, complies with UEFI Specification v2.7+, and significantly enhances the timeliness and practicality of firmware-level digital forensics.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Cyber-crime defenses and forensics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

Today's computer systems come with a pre-installed tiny operating system, which is also known as UEFI. UEFI has slowly displaced the former legacy PC-BIOS while the main task has not changed: It is responsible for booting the actual operating system. However, features like the network stack make it also useful for other applications. This paper introduces UEberForensIcs, a UEFI application that makes it easy to acquire memory from the firmware, similar to the well-known cold boot attacks. There is even UEFI code called by the operating system during runtime, and we demonstrate how to utilize this for forensic purposes.

Problem

• Enabling forensic memory acquisition from UEFI firmware
• Leveraging UEFI runtime code for forensic investigations
• Addressing forensic readiness in modern firmware systems

Innovation

• UEFI application for memory acquisition
• Utilizes firmware for forensic readiness
• Leverages runtime UEFI code forensically