Review on Cloud Forensics: An Open Discussion on Challenges and Capabilities

Suchana Datta, Koushik Majumder, Debashis De
2016 International Journal of Computer Applications  
Amongst all recently emerging research paradigms, Cloud Computing is very much significant due to its utility services provisioning with shared and virtualized resources. Cloud is going to provide Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) in very near future because all the services (Infrastructure, Platform, Software) will be made available as and when required and that too with high flexibility and low cost. Consumers can avail all the services without investing for infrastructures. There lies the spark
more » ... of it which attracts the cloud attackers to get indulged in malicious activities and this creates a threat for this technology. Cloud Forensics is a new outlook introduced to identify, analyze and investigate these security threats. This paper insights a better awareness about cloud forensics illustrating all its related technical aspects, few of the suggested architectures and thus it identifies the major research scopes and challenges as well so that Cloud technology can be made secure from various threats and attacks. Cloud computing, shortly expressed as 'on-Demand Computing' is mainly based on Internet. In this computing technology, data, information and various required shared resources are provisioned to computers or various other electronics devices on-demand. Different users and enterprises are provided cloud computing and storage solutions so that they are able to store and process data in several third party data centers. Shared services and converged infrastructure is the main concept of this new technology. So, basically information resources and underlying infrastructure and mechanism of delivering those data to the client are separated in this technology. In 2009, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed the definition of cloud computing as "... a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." [1][2][3][4] Digital Forensics A step by step mechanism aimed to analyze digital data and preserve the integrity and confidentiality of the chain of custody is expounded as Digital Forensics. This include several steps, like-proper identification of evidences, collection, preservation of sized media extracted from the
doi:10.5120/ijca2016910521 fatcat:vl42hn3odzcejecezzntwlivxm