Runtime process memory patching for restoring state

Question

I\'m looking for a method for storing the process memory, and restore it later at certain conditions.

...

Actually I\'ve read questions about it... It seems

Answer 1

ReadProcessMemory is for reading the memory of another process. Inside of a process, it's unnecessary -- you can just dereference a pointer to read memory within the same process.

To find the blocks of memory in a process, you can use VirtualQuery. Each block will be tagged with a state, type, size, etc. Here's some code I wrote years ago to walk the block list for a specified process (using VirtualQueryEx). You use VirtualQuery pretty much the same way, except that you don't have to specify a process, since it always walks the process in which its running.

#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN
#include 
#include 
#include 

unsigned long usage;

void show_modules(HANDLE process) {

    unsigned char *p = NULL;
    MEMORY_BASIC_INFORMATION info;

    for ( p = NULL;
        VirtualQueryEx(process, p, &info, sizeof(info)) == sizeof(info);
        p += info.RegionSize ) 
    {
        printf("%#10.10x (%6uK)\t", info.BaseAddress, info.RegionSize/1024);

        switch (info.State) {
        case MEM_COMMIT:
            printf("Committed");
            break;
        case MEM_RESERVE:
            printf("Reserved");
            break;
        case MEM_FREE:
            printf("Free");
            break;
        }
        printf("\t");
        switch (info.Type) {
        case MEM_IMAGE:
            printf("Code Module");
            break;
        case MEM_MAPPED:
            printf("Mapped     ");
            break;
        case MEM_PRIVATE:
            printf("Private    ");
        }
        printf("\t");

        if ((info.State == MEM_COMMIT) && (info.Type == MEM_PRIVATE))
            usage +=info.RegionSize;

        int guard = 0, nocache = 0;

        if ( info.AllocationProtect & PAGE_NOCACHE)
            nocache = 1;
        if ( info.AllocationProtect & PAGE_GUARD )
            guard = 1;

        info.AllocationProtect &= ~(PAGE_GUARD | PAGE_NOCACHE);

        switch (info.AllocationProtect) {
        case PAGE_READONLY:
            printf("Read Only");
            break;
        case PAGE_READWRITE:
            printf("Read/Write");
            break;
        case PAGE_WRITECOPY:
            printf("Copy on Write");
            break;
        case PAGE_EXECUTE:
            printf("Execute only");
            break;
        case PAGE_EXECUTE_READ:
            printf("Execute/Read");
            break;
        case PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE:
            printf("Execute/Read/Write");
            break;
        case PAGE_EXECUTE_WRITECOPY:
            printf("COW Executable");
            break;
        }

        if (guard)
            printf("\tguard page");
        if (nocache)
            printf("\tnon-cachable");
        printf("\n");
    }
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {

    int pid;

    if (argc != 2) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s ", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    sscanf(argv[1], "%i", &pid);

    HANDLE process = OpenProcess( 
        PROCESS_VM_READ | PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, 
        false,
        pid);

    show_modules(process);
    printf("Total memory used: %luKB\n", usage/1024);
    return 0;
}