The Impact Of Cloud Computing And Storage On Cyber-Forensic Investigations

The cloud has also given many issues to the field of digital forensics due to the fact that the cloud is part of many applications and software. Software that is hard to grasp physically since most servers that deploy use of the cloud are hidden in very deep corporate areas such as Microsoft, or is scattered across vast space of the internet (CNN Money, Goldman). The cloud has proven itself a valuable tool in the world of digital media but nonetheless has become a tedious and controversial topic in the world of digital forensics. Although there are advances towards the cloud becoming more useful in digital forensics regarding cybernetic crimes and incriminating evidence, the cloud has proven itself very difficult to be analyzed and processed according to the procedure that digital forensic analysts engage upon such as extracting evidence and using it for court

Digital forensics is a branch that is over the recovery and investigation of materials found in digital devices, it gives a better understanding of the situation. Back before the computers, researchers used to investigate the situation through eyewitnesses, evidences, and trying to recreate what happened in that area. Digital devices are everywhere this day and age. “Computers and networks have become so ubiquitous in our society, such an integral part of our daily lives, that any investigation or legal dispute will likely involve some form of digital evidence.” Casey, 2009 Introduction. Through electronics, it can store the needed evidence to be used in the future.

Over the last few years law enforcement has shown some major development and growth when it comes to forensic technology. The use of things such as cell phones, computers, gps devices has drastically increased. As a result, these devices regularly contain vital evidence, including user data, call logs, position, text messages, email, imageries and audio and video recordings. When it comes to cyber forensics, law enforcement has a substantial challenge in keeping current with technology changes. New technology is released onto the marked very quickly, both hardware and software. It is imperative that these agents know when these things will hit the market and how to use them. The enormous capacity of information contained on digital devices

This paper will help explain the basic understanding of computer forensics. I will also identify five areas in computers and computer application a forensic investigator can look for digital evidence. I will identify three types of criminal investigations that can utilize the services of computer forensic investigators. This paper will help with the understanding of computer forensics.

Digital forensics is the process of uncovering and interpreting electronic data for use in a court of law. The main goal of the process is to preserve any evidence in its most original form while performing a structured investigation by collecting, identifying and validating the digital information which will be admissible in a court of law. To collect the document has to follow certain guidelines. United States v. Gourde (2006) and United States v. Zeigler (2007) are both great examples of cases to investigate the case. The primary goal of this document is to demonstrate the importance of digital forensics in solving criminal investigation. In the following paragraph two criminal cases are studied and analyzed.

We live in the information age; the way people communicate and practice business has changed tremendously. Everyday new technologies such as: operating systems, applications and automated software make our lives easier. As computer technologies continue to grow, the necessity of securing private information has not been an easy task for computer networking administrators and information security teams. For digital forensic investigators, staying on top of rapidly evolving technologies had become an everyday challenge. Therefore, there are several factors that play an important role to be successful in digital forensics career. First, you must become familiar with the newly OS platforms. Secondly, continuous testing, evaluation and research could expand the capabilities of a forensic lab. Lastly, forensic investigators should maintain connections with a

Technologies are advancing in today's world where more information is being generated, stored and distributed through digital gadgets. This requires investigators and forensic expert to increase the use of digital evidence gathering as a tool to fight against cyber-crime (International competition network, n.d.).

The current literature reveals a number of proposed frameworks, models and procedures that have been put in place in an attempt to formally describe an effective digital forensic investigation process. In digital forensic investigations, various processes focus on different actions performed, such as the data extraction, data examination, and data gathering and so on. Others tend to be more concerned with the analysis of the data extracted from the digital media.

Cloud computing has become one of the most popular computing paradigms. Today, the number of cybercrimes against cloud computing is increased where attackers using new techniques and method that make the process of tracking them difficult. This makes digital investigators and practitioners to think about designing and developing new techniques and tools to cope with the cybercrimes investigation in the cloud environment. Digital forensics strategies, methodologies, and techniques have to evolve to become efficient and effective to investigate severe attacks and crimes in the cloud. Digital forensics is considered as the process of collecting, extracting and recovery of digital evidence as an admissible proof about a committed crime that will

In a world where technology is increasingly becoming the way of life, it was only a matter of time before crime was no longer just in the streets but happening online as well. Criminals now get a new approach to carry out their crimes with the use of computers. Since technology is more like a murder mystery than catching the bad guy in the act, a new discipline of forensics needed to be put into place. This is known as computer forensics. Forensic science is any science used for the purpose of law. In the case of computer forensics it is “the discipline that combines elements of law and computer science to collect and analyze data from computer systems, networks, wireless communications, and storage devices in a way that is admissible as evidence in a court of law” (U.S. Cert, 2008). Meaning if you do something illegal on the Internet it can be found.

Cloud Forensics combines cloud computing and digital forensics. It is concerned with computer forensics with some consideration to network/intrusion forensics. Computer forensic focus on using procedures to create audit trails based on the residing data. Network forensic focus on analyzing network traffic and gathering information by monitoring that traffic to extract or collect information that might be considered a possible evidence. Intrusion forensic is concerned with investigating possible intrusions to computers or networks [4] [5].

Data is lost when an adversary cancels a cloud contract and a VM is powered down as a result. Real network and router logs cannot be gathered by the cloud customer for forensic purposes. Evidence is untrustworthy due to the cloud service provider (CSP) involvement in the collection of evidential data. Metadata is lost in the process of evidence gathering and the integrity of evidence data gathered cannot be verified. Another challenge is that evidence gathering has to be timely to prevent an adversary of destroying or modifying data in the time that the law enforcement agency (LEA) has to wait for search warrants due red tape of cross border investigations due to the distributed nature of cloud computing. Due to the elastic resources of cloud computing environments and increasing storage capacity of devices and computer systems, there is really no limit to storage capacity and the investigator is faced with the problem of gathering extremely large volumes of data placed in the cloud by cloud customers. The amount of forensic data to be processed is outgrowing the ability to process the data in a timely manner. The process of the evidence gathering in the cloud computing has become cumbersome and time consuming for the investigator and disruptive for the cloud customer. LEAs are increasingly finding that the data in question are either inaccessible or very difficult to access.

This section of paper includes why we need cloud computing as a security control tool against the cyber criminal activities and in how many ways it can be implemented. As we are living in a technical era, many aspects of our lives rely on the Internet and computers, including transportation, communications, government, medicine, finance and education. Consider how much of our personal information is stored either on our own computer or on someone else’s system.

A cloud service account is very similar to most web-based account; access to the account requires a username and password for authentication. Threat such as phishing and person-in-the-middle attacks used to gain access to passwords can result in an attacker gaining access to a cloud service account. Once the attacker gains access to the account steal data, manipulate data, redirect traffic, or carry out attacks from your allocated resource which can devastate an organizations reputation (Cloud Security Alliance, 2011).

Usage of remote servers via internet to store, manage and process data instead of using a personal computer is known as Cloud computing. It’s a set of Information Technology services with the ability to scale up or down their service requirements. Most of the cloud services are provided by a third party service provider. In cloud computing, organizations can utilize IT services without in advance investment. Despite its benefits obtained from the cloud computing, the organizations are slow in accepting it due to security issues and challenges. Security is one of the major problems which hinder the growth of cloud. It’s not wise to handing over the important data to another company; such that clients need to be vigilant in understanding the risks of data infringement in this new environment. This paper discusses a detailed analysis of the cloud computing security issues and challenges. (Ayoleke)