A blockchain-based cloud forensics architecture for privacy leakage prediction with cloud

Abstract

Digital forensics has intelligently evolved into cloud forensics, which protects against cybercrime. However, centralized evidence gathering and maintenance reduces the credibility of digital evidence. This article suggests a unique digital forensic architecture for the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud combining rapidly expanding Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain technologies to address this serious issue. Blockchain helps to store the gathered evidence, which means it is shared among many peers in the proposed forensic architecture. The Secure-Ring-Verification-based Authentication (SRVA) technique is recommended to ensure security from suspicious accounts. The Harmony Search Optimization (HSO) technique helps to produce secret keys that strengthen the cloud environment. Depending on their level of sensitivity, all information is encrypted and kept on a cloud server. Sensitive Aware Deep Elliptic Curve Cryptography (SAD-ECC) method was used for encryption. In the cloud, a piece of information is saved, and the SDN manager creates the blocks and stores the history of that piece of data as metadata. Utilizing Secure Hashing Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), a Merkle Hash Tree is constructed for each block. The proposed technology uses Fuzzy-based Smart Contracts (FSCs) to enable clients to trail their data. At last, evidence analysis is made possible by creating a Logical-Graph of Evidence (LGoE) using data collected through Blockchain. The network simulator-3.26 and java (for cloud and Blockchain) environment are used for experiments. A thorough investigation shows that the suggested forensic architecture exhibits favorable response, evidence insertion, and verification times.