How to read all the memory of another process in windows?

Question

The title really says it all, I want to have all the readable memory of another process in a buffer. I understand that I will have to use ReadProcessMemory(), but If I'm correct I can't just use one call to ReadProcessMemory() starting from address 0 for example, because there would be addresses that are non readable in the range.

I have one idea, which I believe should work, I would like to know if this is an actual solution and if there are any better solutions.

My idea would be to start from address 0 and use VirtualQueryEx to check if the current range is readable, if yes I read it, and in both cases I jump forward the size of the range, and repeat until VirtualQueryEx returns that my address is too high.

Would this actually get all the memory? Is there a better/different method?

Answer 1

Yes, as you have surmised, you can start from address 0, use VirtualQueryEx to get information about that whole region of memory, including the start and end address of the region. Then you can go straight to the end of that region, which is the beginning of the next region, and use VirtualQueryEx to get information about that region. Repeat until you get to the end of the address space.

As you go along, you can use ReadProcessMemory to read the data. Note that there are many types of memory regions; only "committed" regions are actually associated with memory. Reading from uncommitted memory regions will fail.

Answer 2

What you are asking for is quite literally an affront to the very core principles of a modern operating system. The modern operating system, whether you are referring to *Nix or Windows, is built on the clear delineation of Kernel and User Space. The Kernel space is really the only place where such a thing would ever be allowed, as the Kernel has the sole responsibility to map the physical memory addresses of the hardware to the virtual memory address space that is allocated to individual processes. The memory allocation to the individual processes is bounded in the User space and is virtually mapped in such a way that you cannot reliably or explicitly refer to actual physical address locations.

This security feature is not only ingrained into the core functions of the kernel, but is also ingrained into the physical hardware of the CPU itself with codified machine instructions provided to ensure that user space is protected.

With all of that being said, if this is something you absolutely must be able to do, then your only options are to develop functionality into custom kernel modules (possible in *Nix systems, is it even possible in windows???), or you can in some circumstances implement shared memory regions between specific processes. If your goal is to debug a specific process though then I would look into specific tools like gdb for inspection of symbols and memory allocations that have been allocated. All of these things are too broad to specify in a single answer however.