A comparative analysis of cloud forensic techniques in IaaS

Abstract

With the growth of cloud users, various criminal activities, attacks, suspicious, or malicious activities in cloud environment are growing day by day. It is the responsibility of cloud service providers (CSP) to secure the user data residing on cloud. Cloud forensic is the field of study that helps in investigating the criminal activities taking place in the cloud environment. Proper identification of the threat and presenting it in the court of law is desired. Traditional digital forensics method is not applicable in the multi-tenant cloud environment which gave rise to cloud forensics. There are certain proposed cloud forensics methods which help in identifying the malicious users. These approaches have certain advantages and limitations. This paper focuses on the various cloud forensics methods that are proposed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. IaaS model is more vulnerable to attacks because virtual machine (VM) works in that layer. Generally most of the crimes take place using VM. A detailed comparative analysis is done in this paper highlighting each of the existing cloud forensics methods, their advantages, and drawbacks. Further, the future research areas are pointed out which will help in developing a better cloud forensic model by overcoming the drawbacks of the various existing methods.