Abstract
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the emerging and well accepted concept that significantly removes the constraints of mobile devices in terms of storage and computing capabilities and improves productivity, enhances performance, saves energy, and elevates user experience. The consolidation of cloud computing, wireless communication infrastructure, portable computing devices, location- based services, and mobile web has led to the inauguration of novel computing model. The Mobile social networks and cloud computing technology have gained rapid and intensive attention in recent years because of its numerous available benefits. Despite being an advanced technology to communicate and socialize with friends, the diverse and anonymous nature of mobile cloud social networking applications makes them very vulnerable to crimes and illegal activities. On considering the point of mobile cloud computing benefits, the forensic assistance based mobile cloud computing could offer a solution to the problem of social networking applications. Therefore, this work proposes a Mobile Cloud Forensic Framework (MCFF) to facilitate forensic investigation in social networking applications. The MCFF comprises of two components such as the forensic logging module and the forensic investigation process. The forensic logging module is a readiness component that is installed both the device and on the cloud. The ClouDroid Inspector (CDI) tool uses of the record traced by forensic logging module and conduct the investigation in both the mobile and the cloud. The MCFF identifies and collects the automated synchronized copies of data on both the mobile and cloud environment to prove and establish the use of cloud service via Smartphones.
Highlights
The skyrocketed explosion of mobile applications and the support of cloud computing for a variety of services for the mobile users has motivated to integrate the cloud computing into the mobile environment
The proposed unified framework supports a variety of social network applications running on diverse mobile devices, and it is a standard framework flexible enough to work with different cloud service providers
The forensic analysis of social networking applications of Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace on three popular smartphones such as BlackBerry Torch 9800, iPhone 4, and the Androidbased Samsung Galaxy S was conducted to determine whether activities performed through these applications were stored in the internal memory of the device [18]
Summary
The skyrocketed explosion of mobile applications and the support of cloud computing for a variety of services for the mobile users has motivated to integrate the cloud computing into the mobile environment. The mobile users communicate through the cloud storage services to store the data and access storage through a variety of Inter- connected devices [5]. Several free and paid cloud storage services are available such as Dropbox [7], Microsoft SkyDrive [8], and Google Drive [9] These remote cloud storage services store the data of mobile social networking applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Google plus, and WhatsApp. the information collected from the mobile cloud storage has a high forensic value. Cyber criminals and illegal activities exploit the advantage of the mobile cloud environment to commit crimes in social networking applications. This work attempts to conduct forensic investigation in mobile cloud social networking application by developing a mobile cloud forensic framework.
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