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arXiv · 2505.05697

Bringing Forensic Readiness to Modern Computer Firmware

Tobias Latzo·Florian Hantke·Lukas Kotschi·Felix Freiling
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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.

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Tobias Latzo, Florian Hantke, Lukas Kotschi, Felix Freiling. 2025-05-09. Bringing Forensic Readiness to Modern Computer Firmware. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05697

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