Digital Forensic Investigator for Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing has got a dominant position in the field of computing with its roots in virtualization techniques and its characteristics such as scalability, elasticity, availability and many more. As cloud computing has been adopted by many companies and businesses, security becomes a main challenging aspect. Though cloud computing comes with secured deployment models, criminals still find a way to break it and commit crimes; therefore, cloud computing must always be ready to support the forensics investigation to deal with such security issues and the acts of criminals. Cloud forensics is a field in cyber forensics domain using which investigators can collect the digital evidence of a crime which took place in a cloud environment and present the same as a proof of evidence. This paper intends to provide a prototype model with implementation that makes the forensic task easier by collecting, preserving and presenting the data to the investigator by simplifying the task of data collection phase of the forensic investigation.