Data Tamper Detection from NoSQL Database in Forensic Environment

Abstract

The growth of service sector is increasing the usage of digital applications worldwide. These digital applications are making use of database to store the sensitive and secret information. As the database has distributed over the internet, cybercrime attackers may tamper the database to attack on such sensitive and confidential information. In such scenario, maintaining the integrity of database is a big challenge. Database tampering will change the database state by any data manipulation operation like insert, update or delete. Tamper detection techniques are useful for the detection of such data tampering which play an important role in database forensic investigation process. Use of NoSQL database has been attracted by big data requirements. Previous research work has limited to tamper detection in relational database and very less work has been found in NoSQL database. So there is a need to propose a mechanism to detect the tampering of NoSQL database systems. Whereas this article proposes an idea of tamper detection in NoSQL database such as MongoDB and Cassandra, which are widely used document-oriented and column-based NoSQL database respectively. This research work has proposed tamper detection technique which works in forensic environment to give more relevant outcome on data tampering and distinguish between suspicious and genuine tampering.