Modelling cloud forensic-enabled services

Abstract

Cloud forensics assist investigators on solving cloud-based cyber-crimes. Although investigators use forensic methods and tools to cope with incidents, there are other aspects that put barriers to the whole investigation process. One of these aspects is the way cloud services are designed and implemented. Software engineers are responsible for the design and implementation of them but in many cases, cloud services are not designed nor implemented as cloud forensic-enabled, introducing issues to the outcome of the potential investigation. To design cloud services capable of assisting investigators to solve an incident is a challenge. To overcome this issue, in this paper we present a requirements engineering framework to support software engineers in the elicitation of forensic requirements and the design of forensic-enabled cloud services. The framework considers a set of cloud forensic constraints and a modelling language for the successful collaboration of them with the rest of the requirements engineering concepts. The main advantage of the proposed model is the correlation of cloud services’ characteristics with the cloud investigation while providing software engineers the ability to de-sign and implement cloud forensic-enabled services via the use of process patterns.