Hard Clues in Soft Environments: The Cloud's Influence on Digital Forensics

Abstract

Cloud forensics is an open and important area of research due to the growing interest in cloud technology. The increasing frequency of digital investigations brings with it the need for studying specific scenarios in the area of forensics, both when evidence are inside the cloud and when the cloud can be used as platform to perform the investigations. In this chapter we highlight the problems digital forensics must deal with in the Cloud. We introduce historical roots of digital forensics, as well as an overall background about the Cloud and we provide possible meanings of cloud forensics, based on available definitions. Since the cloud introduces different architectural paradigm that affects all the phases of a forensics investigation, in this survey we detail many security issues digital forensics have to face in a cloud environment. We describe when and what available solutions exist and, on the contrary, the still open problems, and we discuss possible future directions in this field.