Extraction of Electronic Evidence from VoIP: Forensic Analysis of A Virtual Hard Disk Vs RAM

The popularity of Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) is increasing as the cost savings and ease of use is realised by a wide range of home and corporate users. However, the technology is also attractive to criminals. This is because VoIP is a global telephony service, in which it is difficult to verify the user’s identification. The security of placing such calls may also be appealing to criminals, as many implementations use strong encryption to secure both the voice payload as well as to control messages making monitoring such VoIP calls difficult since conventional methods such as wire-tapping is not applicable to VoIP calls. Therefore, other methods of recovering electronic evidence and information from VoIP are required. This research looks at what protocol evidence remains after a VoIP call has taken place examining both a virtual hard disk and the Random Access Memory (RAM). This paper proposes a set of identifiable credentials based on packet header information contained within the VoIP protocol stack. A series of controlled tests were undertaken whereby these credentials were forensically searched for on a virtual machine which was used to make the VoIP call. This experiment was then repeated by a search for the same protocol credentials within the RAM.