Analysis of Cloud Forensics Techniques for Emerging Technologies

Digital forensic methods for cybercrime investigation in a cloud computing environment (i.e., cloud forensic) is a broad term that encompasses a number of different fields, including digital forensics and cloud computing. The authors hope to gain a better understanding of cloud computing and identify challenges and opportunities in forensic science. They present research that may be used to establish strategies for the creation of measures, standards, and technological research to minimise the issues that cannot be solved with current technology and methodologies. Among the topics covered in this chapter are cloud computing, digital forensics, cybercrimes, and cloud forensics. Also covered are an overview and principles of cloud computing as well as digital forensics, cybercrimes, and challenges, as well as opportunities in the field of cloud forensics. The state of the art in the cloud forensic domain is also presented, as is a literature review on related work to digital forensics techniques in the cloud computing environment.

The digital forensics refers to the application of scientific techniques in investigation of a crime, specifically to identify or validate involvement of some suspect in an activity leading towards that crime. Network forensics particularly deals with the monitoring of network traffic with an aim to trace some suspected activity from normal traffic or to identify some abnormal pattern in the traffic that may give clue towards some attack. Network forensics, quite valuable phenomenon in investigation process, presents certain challenges including problems in accessing network devices of cloud architecture, handling large amount network traffic, and rigorous processing required to analyse the huge volume of data, of which large proportion may prove to be irrelevant later on. Cloud Computing technology offers services to its clients remotely from a shared pool of resources, as per clients customized requirement, any time, from anywhere. Cloud Computing has attained tremendous popularity recently, leading to its vast and rapid deployment, however Privacy and Security concerns have also increased in same ratio, since data and application is outsourced to a third party. Security concerns about cloud architecture have come up as the prime barrier hindering the major shift of industry towards cloud model, despite significant advantages of cloud architecture. Cloud computing architecture presents aggravated and specific challenges in the network forensics. In this paper, I have reviewed challenges and issues faced in conducting network forensics particularly in the cloud computing environment. The study covers limitations that a network forensic expert may confront during investigation in cloud environment. I have categorized challenges presented to network forensics in cloud computing into various groups. Challenges in each group can be handled appropriately by either Forensic experts, Cloud service providers or Forensic tools whereas leftover challenges are declared as beyond the control.

Exploration of Vulnerabilities, Threats and Forensic Issues and its impact on the Distributed Environment of Cloud and its mitigation

Digital forensics is the study of discovering evidence pertaining to digital crimes & attacks. To monitor and investigate cloud-based crimes, Cloud Forensics (CF) operates as a subfield of Digital Forensics. Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving, worldwide network of interconnected servers. Therefore, Cloud Forensics belongs to Network Forensics, which is a subset of Digital Forensics. There is yet to be an overt forensic revolution in the cloud service, which includes cloud businesses, cloud service providers, & cloud service customers. They cannot guarantee the security of their system or quality of their services that aid in criminal & cybercrime investigations without this crucial forensic capacity. This research study analyzes the forensics procedure, the difficulties of CF, and the tools available to help the investigation. In the context of Blockchain Technology (BT), the approaches to solutions and future possibilities of CF have been outlined. These investigations will pave the path for future scholars to have a deeper grasp of the difficulties and develop innovative solutions.

Our world is proliferated with high-end devices that have multiple capabilities. These devices have an array of sensors embedded into them that collect an enormous amount of data. Because of rapid development in technology, these devices are capable of rendering state-of-the-art services that are based on the cloud. Assuredly, the proliferation of ultra-modern devices with high-end services, have modernized and eased our lives. But, some entities or adversaries of our society are exploiting the same technological innovation for their benefits. Such criminal activities have become even easier to be carried out with modern devices and other technologies. Fortunately, we can examine the confiscated digital devices such as android smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, etc., from a crime scene and gain insight into the criminal activities carried out by the adversaries. It is also possible for us to recover the data the adversaries have collected or transmitted. Since modern devices utilize the services provided by cloud computing, it naturally becomes essential for the analysis of the cloud in case of the investigation of a crime scene. IoT forensics is interdisciplinary, as the data to be investigated may be collected from sensors, smart devices, etc., connected to a crime scene and the cloud too. Digital Forensics is an easier task to be performed when compared to Cloud Forensics. The segregation and collection of evidence in a cloud forensic investigation is a mammoth task due to the distributed and multi-tenant nature of cloud computing. But there is no such problem associated with digital forensic investigation. In this chapter, we have reviewed the work on Digital, Cloud and IoT Forensics by the scientific community. We have compared their effort and the outcome of their work, and summarized the state-of-the-art in the field of Digital, Cloud and IoT Forensics. Our aim of this chapter is to create a thorough review that will help fellow researchers in thought association for getting a clearer picture of the current state of research on Digital, Cloud and IoT Forensics and find the research gaps.

Cloud computing is a promising next generation computing paradigm which offers significant economic benefits to both commercial and public entities. Due to the unique combination of characteristics that cloud computing introduce, including; on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service, digital investigations face various technical, legal and organizational challenges to keep up with current developments in the field of cloud computing. There are plenty of issues that need to be resolved in order to perform a proper digital investigation in the cloud environment. This paper examines the challenges in cloud forensics that are identified in the current research literature. Furthermore it explores the current research proposals and technical solutions addressed in the respective research. Ultimately, it highlights the open problems that need further efforts to be tackled.

The focus of cloud forensics is cyber-crime cases, no matter the object, the subject, or the environment involved. Each cloud computing environment has a variety of features that make it unique. Challenges associated with cloud forensics can be found at every stage of the digital forensics process. We need to begin by understanding the cloud forensics landscape (the cloud) in order to provide a holistic solution to overcome these challenges. While designing the cloud forensics framework, the elements that make up the cloud should be taken into consideration, which also impact the forensics process within the cloud. An extensive survey of the current state of research in cloud forensics is presented in this paper. Also, a conceptual cloud forensics framework that facilitates the identification, gathering, and analysis of cloud computing events is proposed, utilizing the design science approach. The proposed conceptual cloud forensics framework consists of six stages: identifying incidents, gathering evidence, preserving evidence, analyzing incidents, documenting incidents, and investigating post-incident events. Each stage has several activities and tasks to assist investigators dealing with cloud computing events. Unlike traditional approaches to cloud forensic investigations, the conceptual framework developed in this study is highly applicable.

Cloud computing is evolving web based technology. Which provide various service to physical IT infrastructure which is managed and hosted by third party. Features due to which cloud find its application in E-learning, cloud based ERP and E-governance are flexibility, availability, scalability, efficiency and reliability. As large number of computing technology is involved in cloud computing it is an object of security issues. In this research, we have discussed about basics of cloud computing, features, models, application, security issue, basics of digital forensics and cloud forensic as well as the challenges faced during the cloud investigation. Keywords :Cloud computing, E-governance, cloud ERP, E-learning, Forensic, Cloud Forensics

Cloud computing has generated significant interest in both academia and industry, but it is still an evolving paradigm. Cloud computing services are also, a popular target for malicious activities; resulting to the exponential increase of cyber attacks. Digital evidence is the evidence that is collected from the suspect’s workstations or electronic medium that could be used in order to assist computer forensics investigations. Cloud forensics involves digital evidence collection in the cloud environment. The current established forensic procedures and process models require major changes in order to be acceptable in cloud environment. This paper, aims to assess challenges forensic examiners face in tracking down and using digital information stored in the cloud and discuss the importance of education and training to handle, manage and investigate computer evidence.KeywordsCloud computingCloud forensicsDigital evidenceCyber security strategyComputer misuse actAnti-forensicsChallenges of cloud forensics

Some positive edges of cloud computing such scalability, elasticity, accessing the cloud from anywhere, and device-independent nature of cloud, has opened many doors for many intruders to carry out their mischief acts with respect to the data stored in the clouds. It is sometimes very difficult to trace out the exact fact what has happened with data, due to region effect, due to legal issues, and due to technical issues are the main and huge hurdles that exist in the present scenario; also there lies a main drawback that the present direct cloud forensics methods are not too much effective to overcome the problem. One among the buzzing technologies in today’s techno world is cloud forensics, which has its own importance in many aspects due to exponential growth to data, to reduce maintenance cost, to provide security measures to the data, and these things make the individual persons to move and attract toward cloud concept, as cloud can go with these things easily where the client has to pay for the desired flavors of services which they want to utilize. As the huge and huge amount of data is being accumulated at a place due to which it sometimes compromise may be arose when cloud service provider do not take standard measures to overcome this.

Cloud Computing and Forensic Accounting: Friends or Foes?

Today, cloud computing has developed a transformative model for the organization, business, governments that brings huge potentials and turn into popular for pay as you go, on-demand service, scalability and efficient services. However, cloud computing has made the concern for forensic data because of the architecture of cloud system is not measured appropriately. Due to the distributed nature of the cloud system, many aspects relating to the forensic investigation such as data collection, data storage, crime target, data violation are difficult to achieve. Investigating the incidents in the cloud environment is a challenging task because the forensics investigator still needs to relay on the third party such as cloud service provider for performing their investigation tasks. It makes the overall forensic process difficult to complete with a duration and presented it to the court. Recently, there are some cloud forensics studies to address the challenges such as evidence collection, data acquisition, identifying the incidents and so on. However, still, there is a research gap in terms of consistency of analysing forensic evidence from distributed environment and methodology to analyse the forensic data in the cloud. This thesis contributes towards the direction of addressing the research gaps. In particular, this work proposes a forensic investigation framework CeFF: A framework for forensics enabled cloud investigation to investigate evidence in the cloud computing environment. The framework includes a set of concepts from organisational, technical and legal perspectives, which gives a holistic view of analysing cybercrime from organisation context where the crime has occurred through technical context and legal impact. The CeFF also includes a systematic process that uses the concept for performing the investigation. The cloud-enabled forensics framework meets all the forensics related requirement such as data collection, examination, presents the report, and identifies the potential risks that can consider while investigating the evidence in the cloud-computing environment. Finally, the proposed CeFF is applied to a real-life example to validate its applicability. The result shows that CeFF supports analysing the forensic data for a crime occurred in cloud-based system in a systematic way.

Data provenance for cloud forensic investigations, security, challenges, solutions and future perspectives: A survey

Cloud forensics is an open and important area of research due to the growing interest in cloud technology. The increasing frequency of digital investigations brings with it the need for studying specific scenarios in the area of forensics, both when evidence are inside the cloud and when the cloud can be used as platform to perform the investigations. In this chapter we highlight the problems digital forensics must deal with in the Cloud. We introduce historical roots of digital forensics, as well as an overall background about the Cloud and we provide possible meanings of cloud forensics, based on available definitions. Since the cloud introduces different architectural paradigm that affects all the phases of a forensics investigation, in this survey we detail many security issues digital forensics have to face in a cloud environment. We describe when and what available solutions exist and, on the contrary, the still open problems, and we discuss possible future directions in this field.

The development of sixth‐generation (6G) wireless communication technology is expected to provide super high‐speed data transmission, and advanced network performance than the current fifth‐generation (5G) and be fully functional by the 2030s. This development will have a significant impact and add improvements to digital extended reality (XR), autonomous systems, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), artificial intelligence (AI), underwater communications, blockchain technology, pervasive biomedical informatics and smart cities built on the digital infrastructure backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT). The ubiquitous nature of this large‐scale 6G‐enabled IoT that offers faster connectivity capabilities and integrates both terrestrial and non‐terrestrial networks will not only create new data security and privacy issues but also provide a treasure trove of digital evidence useful for digital forensic examiners investigating security incidents and cybercrime. However, for digital forensic examiners, evidence collection, preservation and analysis will become a priority in the successful deployment of 6G IoT networks. In this study, we define key applications of 6G network technology to the Internet of Things and its existing architectures. The survey introduces potential digital forensic challenges and related issues affecting digital forensic investigations specific to 6G IoT networks. Finally, we highlight and discuss forensic readiness and future research directions for identified challenges within the 6G IoT network environments.This article is categorized under: Digital and Multimedia Science > IoT Forensics