Novel Digital Forensic Framework for Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is a transformative computing model for businesses that deliver computer newlinebased services over the Internet. Cloud computing faces major concerns due to its newlinearchitectural characteristics despite the technological innovations that have made it a feasible newlinesolution. The huge popularity and utility of the cloud environment has made it the newlinesoft target of cloud crimes. Investigating cloud crimes and fixing the responsibility of newlinethe cyber crimes committed in the cloud platforms help instill confidence and trust in the newlinestake holders - be the clients, the cloud service providers or the third party entities. Cyber newlinecrime investigation is incomplete without the proper detection of the digital evidence in newlinecloud. In general, cloud computing is characterized by its highly virtualized nature. As newlinevirtualization provides many benefits, it also makes it difficult to detect digital evidence newlinewhen it is in the cloud environment. The approach used for the traditional digital forensic newlinecannot be directly applied to the cloud environment due to the presence of virtualization, newlineand hence cloud crime investigation is more difficult to perform than a traditional physical newlinecomputer investigation. The existing research in cloud forensics has only focused on the newlineorganizational and the legal aspects, where as our work aims to contribute towards the newlinetechnical aspects of forensics in cloud. The aim of this research is to design a generic digital forensic framework for the cloud newlinecrime investigation by identifying the challenges and requirements of forensics in the virtualized newlineenvironment of cloud computing, address the issues of dead/live forensic analysis newlinewithin/outside the virtual machine that runs in a cloud environment, and to design a digital newlineforensic triage using parallel processing framework to examine and partially analyze newlinethe virtual machine data to speed up the investigation of the cloud crime. To analyze newlinethe evidence within the virtual machine, we designed various methods of examining the newlinefile system metadata.