Volatility Framework

The Volatility Framework is an open-source memory forensics framework used for incident response and malware analysis. It was created by Aaron Walters, building on academic research into extracting digital evidence from volatile memory, including a 2006 paper by Nick Petroni, Aaron Walters, Timothy Fraser, and William Arbaugh on techniques for digital forensic data extraction.

Origins

The tool traces its public debut to 2007, when Walters and Petroni presented "Volatools: Integrating Volatile Memory into the Digital Investigation Process" at Black Hat DC. According to the Volatility Foundation, the framework was "first released publicly in 2007 at Black Hat DC," building on prior published academic research into memory analysis. Volatility was distributed as a completely open collection of Python tools under the GNU General Public License (GPL-2.0), intended, per its own documentation, to introduce practitioners to the techniques and complexities of extracting artifacts from RAM samples and to serve as a platform for further research.

Volatility 2.x

Over the following decade, the framework (known as Volatility 2.x) grew to support memory images from Windows (XP through Server 2016), Linux (kernels 2.6.11 through 5.5), and macOS (10.5.x through 10.15 Catalina), across multiple memory formats such as raw physical memory, EWF, Windows crash dumps, VMware snapshots, and QEMU dumps. Version 2.6.1, released December 19, 2018, was among its last major 2.x releases. The original GitHub repository was archived on May 16, 2025, with maintainers directing users to the successor project.

Volatility 3 and the Foundation

Volatility 3, described by its maintainers as a complete rewrite addressing technical and performance limitations of the original ten-year-old codebase, began public releases in October 2019 (version 0.0.1 on PyPI), reached 1.0.0 in February 2021, and 2.0.0 in January 2022, with active releases continuing since. It requires Python 3.8 or later and is distributed under a custom Volatility Software License (VSL v1.0). The project is stewarded by the Volatility Foundation, described as an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit "established to promote the use of Volatility and memory analysis within the forensics community; defend the project's intellectual property...and help advance innovative memory analysis research." The Foundation runs an annual Volatility Plugin Contest (ongoing since 2013) and offers memory forensics training taught by the framework's creators. It describes Volatility as used by "law enforcement, military, academia, and commercial investigators" and calls it "the world's most widely used memory forensics platform" — a self-description not independently audited by outside sources reviewed here. An exact founding date for the Volatility Foundation as an organization was not confirmed in the sources consulted.

Timeline

• 2006Petroni, Walters, Fraser, and Arbaugh publish academic research on techniques for digital forensic data extraction from volatile memory, laying groundwork for Volatility.
• 2007Aaron Walters and Nick Petroni present "Volatools: Integrating Volatile Memory into the Digital Investigation Process" at Black Hat DC; the Volatility Framework is first released publicly, per the Volatility Foundation.
• 2013The Volatility Foundation begins running its annual Volatility Plugin Contest with cash prizes (disputed/unverified exact founding date of the Foundation itself).
• 2018-12-19Volatility 2.6.1 is released, among the last major releases of the original (2.x) Python 2 codebase.
• 2019-10-17First public release of Volatility 3 (version 0.0.1) appears on PyPI, described as a complete rewrite of the framework.
• 2021-02-01Volatility 3 reaches version 1.0.0.
• 2022-01-12Volatility 3 reaches version 2.0.0.
• 2025-05-16The original volatility (2.x) GitHub repository is archived; development consolidates fully into Volatility 3.