Next-Generation Digital Forensic Readiness BYOD Framework

Abstract

Intel’s “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) adoption quickly became popular as an alternative workplace solution strategy. It enables employees to use their personally owned devices to perform business activities, leading to increased productivity and employee satisfaction. However, BYOD also brought associated risks because of exponential growth in the number of cybersecurity incidents due to which business ecosystem gets disrupted and fragmented. Although several methods and mechanisms have been developed and adopted to mitigate the risk associated with BYOD, they still represent a challenge as corporate network gets exposed to inherent threats caused by the BYOD threat landscape. This work demonstrates especially two key aspects: The first focuses on how to detect and protect BYOD environment from an advanced level attack which cannot be detected by traditional tools and techniques even though available tools are quite effective. Before the attack and damage to the critical infrastructure due to BYOD threat, a strategy was indeed the key requirement for detecting attacks and protecting the environment. The second part of the research focuses on conducting forensic investigation model and developing a new approach by providing a reliable forensic investigation infrastructure to find digital evidence and detect the source of attack. This research work concluded with two different novel strategic ideas. The first part contributes to a new method of detecting and protecting against malicious activities which cannot be otherwise detected and protected by traditional security technology like IPS, IDS, AntiBot, or AntiVirus. The proposed technique compared to the existing methods led to a significant contribution to the identification of threats before an attack takes place. The second part of the research contributes to the defining of a new approach of the next-generation digital forensic readiness (NG-DFR) model in order to build a cyber forensic ecosystem so that cyber secured BYOD environment can be enabled safely.