mquire is a Linux memory forensics and analysis tool for querying kernel memory dumps using SQL.
It reconstructs kernel data structures from memory snapshots by combining kernel-embedded BPF Type Format data with Kallsyms symbol information, letting analysts inspect unknown or custom kernels without first collecting external debug symbols. It’s designed for incident response, forensic investigation, security research, malware analysis, and custom tooling around Linux memory snapshots.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Provides SQL tables for system information, running processes, open files, memory mappings, kernel modules, network connections, network interfaces, cached syslog data, and diagnostics.
- Includes an interactive SQL shell together with one-off query and command modes.
- Supports raw physical memory dumps, LiME snapshots, and ELF core dumps.
- Can extract files from the kernel’s file cache, including files that have been deleted from disk but remain cached in memory.
- Offers dot commands for listing tables, showing schemas, displaying process trees, carving virtual memory ranges, and dumping cached files.
- Ships reusable SQL views for process listing, process-network mapping, and hidden process detection.
- Provides packages from CI in Debian/Ubuntu, RPM, and generic tarball formats, and can also be built from source with Cargo.
Website: github.com/trailofbits/mquire
Support:
Developer: Trail of Bits
License: Apache License 2.0
mquire is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Forensics Memory Tools | |
|---|---|
| MemProcFS | View physical memory as files in a virtual file system |
| pypykatz | Python implementation of Mimikatz |
| Volatility | Advanced memory forensics framework |
| AVML | Acquire Volatile Memory for Linux |
| Volshell | CLI tool for working with memory |
| EVTXtract | Recovers and reconstructs fragments of EVTX log files |
| yarp | Yet Another Registry Parser |
| AutoTimeliner | Extract forensic timeline from volatile memory dump |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |