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

Forensics investigation challenges in cloud computing environments

Cloud computing discusses about sharing any imaginable entity such as process units, storage devices or software. The provided service is utterly economical and expandable. Cloud computing attractive benefits entice huge interest of both business owners and cyber thefts. Consequently, the “computer forensic investigation” step into the play to find evidences against criminals. As a result of the new technology and methods used in cloud computing, the forensic investigation techniques face different types of issues while inspecting the case. The most profound challenges are difficulties to deal with different rulings obliged on variety of data saved in different locations, limited access to obtain evidences from cloud and even the issue of seizing the physical evidence for the sake of integrity validation or evidence presentation. This paper suggests a simple yet very useful solution to conquer the aforementioned issues in forensic investigation of cloud systems. Utilizing TPM in hypervisor, implementing multi-factor authentication and updating the cloud service provider policy to provide persistent storage devices are some of the recommended solutions. Utilizing the proposed solutions, the cloud service will be compatible to the current digital forensic investigation practices; alongside it brings the great advantage of being investigable and consequently the trust of the client

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

Recovering Residual Forensic Data from Smartphone Interactions with Cloud Storage Providers

There is a growing demand for cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Syncplicity and SugarSync. These public cloud storage services can store gigabytes of corporate and personal data in remote data centres around the world, which can then be synchronized to multiple devices. This creates an environment which is potentially conducive to security incidents, data breaches and other malicious activities. The forensic investigation of public cloud environments presents a number of new challenges for the digital forensics community. However, it is anticipated that end-devices such as smartphones, will retain data from these cloud storage services. This research investigates how forensic tools that are currently available to practitioners can be used to provide a practical solution for the problems related to investigating cloud storage environments. The research contribution is threefold. First, the findings from this research support the idea that end-devices which have been used to access cloud storage services can be used to provide a partial view of the evidence stored in the cloud service. Second, the research provides a comparison of the number of files which can be recovered from different versions of cloud storage applications. In doing so, it also supports the idea that amalgamating the files recovered from more than one device can result in the recovery of a more complete dataset. Third, the chapter contributes to the documentation and evidentiary discussion of the artefacts created from specific cloud storage applications and different versions of these applications on iOS and Android smartphones

Using smartphones as a proxy for forensic evidence contained in cloud storage services

Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box and SugarSync have been embraced by both individuals and organizations. This creates an environment that is potentially conducive to security breaches and malicious activities. The investigation of these cloud environments presents new challenges for the digital forensics community. It is anticipated that smartphone devices will retain data from these storage services. Hence, this research presents a preliminary investigation into the residual artifacts created on an iOS and Android device that has accessed a cloud storage service. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an initial assessment on the extent to which cloud storage data is stored on these client-side devices. This view acts as a proxy for data stored in the cloud. Secondly, it provides documentation on the artifacts that could be useful in a digital forensics investigation of cloud services

Rethinking Digital Forensics

© IAER 2019In the modern socially-driven, knowledge-based virtual computing environment in which organisations are operating, the current digital forensics tools and practices can no longer meet the need for scientific rigour. There has been an exponential increase in the complexity of the networks with the rise of the Internet of Things, cloud technologies and fog computing altering business operations and models. Adding to the problem are the increased capacity of storage devices and the increased diversity of devices that are attached to networks, operating autonomously. We argue that the laws and standards that have been written, the processes, procedures and tools that are in common use are increasingly not capable of ensuring the requirement for scientific integrity. This paper looks at a number of issues with current practice and discusses measures that can be taken to improve the potential of achieving scientific rigour for digital forensics in the current and developing landscapePeer reviewe