Sunday, September 7, 2008

Volatile University: Memory Forensics in the Classroom

Memory forensics is a critical component of the digital investigation process and an important skill for digital investigators. At Volatile Systems, we are committed to helping educate the community about memory analysis. In support of this commitment, we are currently working with a number of university, college, and continuing education programs to help integrate volatile memory analysis into their digital forensics course work and lab exercises. This is an exciting opportunity for us to work with future digital investigators and those investigators who have gone back to improve their skill set. If you are currently instructing a class on computer forensics and have an interest in exploring how other educators are integrating memory forensics into their curriculum, please let us know.

On a related note, this fall I will be co-teaching a graduate class, ENTS 689I Network Immunity, at the University of Maryland, College Park. This course will actually be composed of three short courses: Cryptography and Information Security, System Security, and Network Security. I am very excited to be teaching this class alongside Dr. Charles Clancy and Dr. Nick Petroni. I consider Charles and Nick to be two of the top systems security researchers. Charles has done some amazing work in the area of wireless networking and Nick pioneered much of the work being done in memory analysis and rootkit detection. Based on the topics which will be covered and the projects that are going to be assigned, this should be a very exciting class! Not to mention, the students will also have the opportunity to learn about memory forensics using Volatility!