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Windows Registry Forensics

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This blog post will cover how registry keys are stored in memory. There are many good tools available to extract windows registry information from memory or dump but it's always good to learn how the information is stored in memory and how these tools are extracting it. Windows Registry (Configuration Manager) in memory is represented using CMHIVE  structure.You can view CMHIVE structure here  https://www.nirsoft.net/kernel_struct/vista/CMHIVE.html . More about Registry structure can be found here  https://binaryforay.blogspot.in/2015/01/registry-hive-basics.html . We can locate CMHIVE structure in memory by scanning pool tag value  CM10 . The pool tag is part of POOL_HEADER ( https://www.nirsoft.net/kernel_struct/vista/POOL_HEADER.html ).The size of POOL_HEADER structure is 8 bytes in 32-bit OS and lies above CMHIVE structure in memory.Below is the result of command ! poolfind <tag> <pooltype>  in windbg where tag is CM10 and pooltype =1 (paged pool). B