Cloud computing forensic analysis: Trends and challenges

Abstract

Computer forensics is a very important field of computer science in relation to computer, mobile and Internet related crimes. The main role of Computer forensic is to perform crime investigation through analyzing any evidence found in digital formats. The massive number of cybercrimes reported recently, raises the importance of developing specialized forensic tools for collecting and studying digital evidences in the digital world, in some situation even before they are lost or deleted. The emergence of the new Cloud Computing paradigm with its unique structures and various service models, had added more challenge to digital forensic investigators to gain the full access and control to the spread cloud resources. While, the current chapter starts to lay the importance of digital forensics as whole, it specially focuses on their role in cybercrimes investigations in the digital cloud. Therefore, the chapter goes through the definition of the basic concepts, structures, and service models of the cloud computing paradigm. Then, it describes the main advantages, disadvantages, challenges that face the digital forensic processes, and techniques that support the isolation and preservation of any digital evidences. Finally, the chapter stresses on a number of challenges in the cloud forensic analysis still open for future research.