Memory Forensics Comparison of Apple M1 and Intel Architecture Using Volatility Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Memory forensics allows an investigator to get a full picture of what is occurring on-device at the time that a memory sample is captured and is frequently used to detect and analyze malware. Malicious attacks have evolved from living on disk to having persistence mechanisms in the volatile memory (RAM) of a device and the information that is captured in memory samples contains crucial information for full forensic analysis by cybersecurity professionals. Recently, Apple unveiled computers containing a custom designed system on a chip (SoC) called the M1 that is based on ARM architecture. Our research focused on the differences in the Volatility memory analysis framework between Apple's new M1 SoC and its previous Intel-based CPUs due to the new architecture. We extracted memory samples from a MacBook Air equipped with a M1 SoC and a Intel-based Mac virtual machine. Using those samples, we ran all the Volatility plugins available for Mac against each memory sample, taking note of any differences or errors that occurred because of the shift in architecture. This is foundational memory forensics work on the M1 ARM platform that will allow future research and improvements to be made on Volatility for M1.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".