Digital forensic readiness in a cloud environment

Abstract

Although cloud computing is maturing, security issues are still prevalent. Most of the security issues that are in the cloud have existed since the advent of the Internet. These issues are escalated in a cloud environment due to its distributed nature, multi-tenancy and the sensitive and large amount of data that is transmitted over the Internet and hosted by third parties. The security aspect that this paper focuses on concerns digital forensics. The cloud spans over multi-jurisdictions. As such, service providers hosting the data that may be required for digital forensic investigation may be reluctant to comply with foreign law enforcement agencies. Even if they comply, this may be a costly and time-consuming exercise, given the amount of hosted data that belongs to multi-tenants. In this paper we present a forensic readiness model that makes use of a Forensic Service hosted in the cloud. The model is aimed at minimizing costs associated with conducting a digital forensic investigation in a distributed cloud environment. The scope of this paper, however, is limited to examining the impact that a forensic readiness mechanism may have on other hosted cloud services. Preliminary results have shown a negligible effect in performance of cloud services by a having our proposed digital forensic readiness mechanism in place.