Forensic model for cloud computing: An overview

Abstract

In new digital era, cyber criminals uses cloud computing as their trusted sector for fraudulent activities due to owing characteristics of cloud computing. This makes cloud forensics, a new discipline in digital world. Recent survey [1] reveals that cyber criminals are adopting towards cloud computing technology for their fraudulent activities due to its essential characteristics that brings safe zone for criminals and also due to the lack of suitable digital forensic techniques for cloud environment. As a result of mitigating cloud crime, cloud forensics came up with number of challenges and issues. The objective of this paper is to put importance on the challenges faced by investigators during investigation process. Most of the research work in the literature highlights the challenges in cloud forensics and the projected solutions in literature depends on Cloud Service Provider (CSP) for forensics investigation. The dependence on CSP includes the collection of data for forensics process and there may be a chance of altering data that affects the whole investigation process. For mitigating dependence on CSP we come up with a new model for collecting forensic evidences outside cloud environment.