C Pointers to scan memory

Question

I sm trying to scan a system's memory.

My plan : Create pointers to point to memory, And move this pointer up one byte each loop.

So this is what i came up with :

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

const char *MemAdressPointer(int n);

int main(void) {

    int i = 0;
    for(i = 0; i<100; i++)
    {
        const char* pAddr = MemAdressPointer(i+5000);
        printf("%c hexadecimal value of : 0x%p with i at : %i
", *pAddr, pAddr, i);
    }
    getchar();
    return 0;
}

const char *MemAdressPointer(int n)
{
    void *p1 = (void*) n;

    const char* p2;
    p2 = p1;

    return p2;
}

Everything, at least that i know of, works.

It prints the good memory address.

But when i print the character (%c) it just stops responding

It is weird, the pointer, being a character,

shouldn't it point to one byte and get this byte's binary value

and get the corresponding character out of it.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Answer 1

That is not how modern operating systems work. You cannot simply read out the systems ram, because applications memory is virtualized and also the OS prohibits direct access due to security policies.

The OS may offer some API to access other processes memory (assumed you have the rights to do). On Win32Api this is ReadProcessMemory.

May be some other OS API allows the direct read out of the systems address space. You may dig into How do you read directly from physical memory?