34,125 research outputs found
Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed
Determining Training Needs for Cloud Infrastructure Investigations using I-STRIDE
As more businesses and users adopt cloud computing services, security
vulnerabilities will be increasingly found and exploited. There are many
technological and political challenges where investigation of potentially
criminal incidents in the cloud are concerned. Security experts, however, must
still be able to acquire and analyze data in a methodical, rigorous and
forensically sound manner. This work applies the STRIDE asset-based risk
assessment method to cloud computing infrastructure for the purpose of
identifying and assessing an organization's ability to respond to and
investigate breaches in cloud computing environments. An extension to the
STRIDE risk assessment model is proposed to help organizations quickly respond
to incidents while ensuring acquisition and integrity of the largest amount of
digital evidence possible. Further, the proposed model allows organizations to
assess the needs and capacity of their incident responders before an incident
occurs.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 5th International Conference on
Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime; Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime, pp.
223-236, 201
Medical Cyber-Physical Systems Development: A Forensics-Driven Approach
The synthesis of technology and the medical industry has partly contributed
to the increasing interest in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS). While
these systems provide benefits to patients and professionals, they also
introduce new attack vectors for malicious actors (e.g. financially-and/or
criminally-motivated actors). A successful breach involving a MCPS can impact
patient data and system availability. The complexity and operating requirements
of a MCPS complicates digital investigations. Coupling this information with
the potentially vast amounts of information that a MCPS produces and/or has
access to is generating discussions on, not only, how to compromise these
systems but, more importantly, how to investigate these systems. The paper
proposes the integration of forensics principles and concepts into the design
and development of a MCPS to strengthen an organization's investigative
posture. The framework sets the foundation for future research in the
refinement of specific solutions for MCPS investigations.Comment: This is the pre-print version of a paper presented at the 2nd
International Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Trustworthiness in Medical
Cyber-Physical Systems (MedSPT 2017
EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution
Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable
challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular
wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered
during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires
overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability.
Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class
for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant
time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning
scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a
more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches.
EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage
and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training.
The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images
containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for
students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and
perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process
extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an
"evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae,
different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence
packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A
number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for
tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also
discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201
Incident Analysis & Digital Forensics in SCADA and Industrial Control Systems
SCADA and industrial control systems have been traditionally isolated in physically protected environments. However, developments such as standardisation of data exchange protocols and increased use of IP, emerging wireless sensor networks and machine-to-machine communication mean that in the near future related threat vectors will require consideration too outside the scope of traditional SCADA security and incident response. In the light of the significance of SCADA for the resilience of critical infrastructures and the related targeted incidents against them (e.g. the development of stuxnet), cyber security and digital forensics emerge as priority areas. In this paper we focus on the latter, exploring the current capability of SCADA operators to analyse security incidents and develop situational awareness based on a robust digital evidence perspective. We look at the logging capabilities of a typical SCADA architecture and the analytical techniques and investigative tools that may help develop forensic readiness to the level of the current threat environment requirements. We also provide recommendations for data capture and retention
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