Amongst all recently emerging research paradigms, Cloud Computing is very much significant due to its utility services provisioning with shared and virtualized resources. Cloud is going to provide Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) in very near future because all the services (Infrastructure, Platform, Software) will be made available as and when required and that too with high flexibility and low cost. Consumers can avail all the services without investing for infrastructures. There lies the spark of it which attracts the cloud attackers to get indulged in malicious activities and this creates a threat for this technology. Cloud Forensics is a new outlook introduced to identify, analyze and investigate these security threats. This paper insights a better awareness about cloud forensics illustrating all its related technical aspects, few of the suggested architectures and thus it identifies the major research scopes and challenges as well so that Cloud technology can be made secure from various threats and attacks.
Cloud Computing, a relatively new concept and all its associated methodologies offer uncountable advantages nowa-days. These advantages range from integrating different systems, offering guarantee over searching mean distribution and to software tools integration, used by various cloud service providers and consumers. So all these provisions are not only making our lives easier but attract lots of intruders and malicious actors to perform various cloud crimes. This paper aims to contribute towards the design of an ontology based cloud forensic framework with a view to identify the malicious actors. The proposed framework consists of mainly two components -Ontology-Enabled Forensic Blackboard (OFB) and Ontology-Enabled Forensic Controller and Processor (OFCP). The main function of OFB is to communicate with the investigators after receiving the classified crime incident scene collected from VM snapshots where ontology base is used spontaneously to distribute the investigators" request for proper information relevant to the investigation. Whereas, the function of the OFCP is to interact with different Cloud Malicious Actor Identifier (CMAI) so that accurate information can be gathered based on the distributed request with the help of a meta-ontology framework that acquire and restructure data using different AI reasoning tools and finally the mapping with its corresponding requests is done.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.