Mobile Cloud Correlated Digital Forensic Process Model based on UML Design

Abstract

The world-wide acceptance of inexpensive and powerful smartphones significantly influences the everyday exercise of human lives due to the availability of a vast range of Mobile Cloud (MC) applications. The misuse of cloud-based mobile application services is the most critical evidential hotspot for forensic practitioners. Establishing an MC correlated forensic process model is inevitable to investigate the criminal activities and speed up the forensic investigation process. This paper proposes a correlated process model from the foundation of traditional forensic models to make the MC forensic process more efficient and accurate. This work devises an MC correlated forensic process model with the support of unified modeling language design to capture the dynamic behavior and incorporates the inter-application analysis of cloud-based mobile applications. This process model correlates the forensic-rich evidence in mobile applications and significantly enables the data traceability of the cloud forensic investigation by employing the metadata. The proposed forensic process applies the logical analysis based evidence interpretation, and time synchronization is useful for maintaining a sequential timeline of evidence that correlates the possible evidence concisely. The correlated process model of MC forensic investigation significantly improves the efficiency of the investigation.