Toward a new mobile cloud forensic framework

Abstract

Smartphones have created a significant impact on the day-to-day activities of every individual. Now-a-days a wide range of Smartphone applications are available and it necessitates high computing resources in order to build these applications. Cloud computing offers enormous resources and extends services to resource-constrained mobile devices. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is emerging as a key technology to utilize virtually unlimited resources over the Internet using Smartphones. Offloading data and computations to improve productivity, enhance performance, save energy, and improve user experience. Social network applications largely utilize MCC to reap the benefits. The social network has witnessed unprecedented growth in the recent years, and millions of registered users access it using Smartphones. The mobile cloud social network applications introduce not only convenience but also various issues related to criminal and illegal activities. Despite being primarily used to communicate and socialize with contacts, the multifarious and anonymous nature of social networking websites increases susceptibility to cybercrimes. Taking into account, the advantage of mobile cloud computing and popularity of social network applications, it is essential to establish a forensic framework based on mobile cloud platform that solves the problems of today's forensic requirements. In this paper we present a mobile cloud forensic framework that allows the forensic investigator to collect the automated synchronized copies of data on both the mobile and cloud servers to prove the evidence of cloud usage. We also show our preliminary results of this study.