Role of Data Hiding Techniques for Detection of Virtual Disks in Cloud Environment

Abstract

In today's era, cloud computing is very popular and the most widly used technique to store the data. As we know more than 75% of the data that is used in internet services and applications is being stored on the maximum cloud only. Where our data is stored in the cloud, it is called data center, there are two important roles in cloud computing technology, one is cloud customer and the other is cloud service provider. The complete control and monitoring at the public data center is of the service provider itself, the user is kept away from the information of the location of the data center and its access credentials. This means that the user has absolutely no information about the virtual machine hard disk, and their access locations. Whenever any forensic inquiry comes in the cloud environment, the Investigator and forensic expert first have to find out about the virtual machine disk and its location in the cloud, which is a very challenging and difficult task in the cloud environment. In this paper we have developed a new process that detects virtual machines using data hiding techniques. To prove this new algorithm, we have performed an experiment using Oracle VirtualBox 6.0 on OpenSUSE virtual machine.