Digital forensics in the cloud: The state of the art

Abstract

The advent of cloud computing has brought new challenges to digital forensics. To address these challenges, new approaches in conducting digital forensic are required. In this paper, challenges that are faced by digital forensic investigator when faced with cloud based incident scenes are presented. The presented challenges are obtained from survey articles that explore outstanding and future challenges in digital forensics in general. In this paper we zoom in into cloud forensics as it is the main focus of the paper. Based on the challenges brought to light by the considered survey articles, we present requirements that should be met by digital forensic systems that aim to investigate cloud environments. Existing architectures and implementations of digital forensic systems are evaluated based on these requirements. Through this evaluation, gaps that are left out by the evaluated architectures are brought to light.