Cloud Computing: The impact on digital forensic investigations

Using Smartphones as a Proxy for Forensic Evidence Contained in Cloud Storage Services

“…Investigating cloud service providers has been a topic of great discussion, with a number of challenges being raised about conducting a digital forensics investigation in such an environment [12][13][14]. One of these challenges is the investigator's ability to identify and recover digital evidence from the cloud in a forensically sound manner [14].…”

“…A growing number of researchers have argued that cloud computing environments are intrinsically harder to investigate than conventional computer artifacts [12][13][14][15][16]. The term 'cloud forensics' is defined as a "cross discipline of cloud computing and digital forensics" [13].…”

Isolating Instances in Cloud Forensics

“…As stated above, a major problem is that a cloud instance that is the focus of an investigation may contain data belonging to multiple users [2]. Thus, isolation of data is an important issue in cloud forensics.…”

“…Isolation helps preserve the integrity of the evidence collected from the instance. However, one of the problems with preserving integrity is that one instance may share storage with multiple instances and the data may not be in a fixed location in the cloud [2]. Another complexity is that other instances on the same cloud node may belong to other users; a forensic investigation should not impact the availability and privacy of these users' resources [6].…”

“…Many of the largest IT companies, notably Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon [2,11], have made massive investments in cloud computing. These companies are employing various techniques to ensure that users can have provisioned cloud resources with the desired levels of confidentiality, integrity and availability.…”