LiveCloudInspector: Towards integrated IaaS forensics in the cloud

Abstract

Cloud-based systems are becoming an increasingly attractive target for malicious attacks. In IaaS environments, malicious attacks on a cloud customer’s virtual machine may affect the customer, who cannot use all diagnostic means that are available in dedicated in-house infrastructures, as well as the cloud provider, due to possible subsequent attacks against the cloud infrastructure and other co-hosted customers. This paper presents an integrated approach towards forensics and incident analysis in IaaS cloud environments. The proposed architecture enables the cloud provider to securely offer forensics services to its customers on a self-service platform. The architecture combines three important analysis techniques and provides significantly better investigation capabilities than existing systems: First, it supports host-based forensics based on virtual machine introspection. Second, it offers live remote capture of network traffic. Third, and most importantly, it provides hybrid combinations of the first two techniques, which enables enhanced analysis capabilities such as support for monitoring encrypted communication.