Secure e-Governance: From observation to policy formulation

This paper proposes to introduce a security policy as part of forensic readiness for a State who is or will be providing Digital Forensics as a Service (DFaaS) integrated with e-Government services. A few of the constituents of DFaaS are the investigating services for crimes which may even be committed by the Infrastructure Providers (IFP) in Cloud Computing Environment (CCE). The policy proposes to acquire a guarantee from IFP that it will not establish any direct connection with its Virtual Machine (VM)s while providing computing resources to any Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or end user. The basic objective of this policy is to maintain Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA) of information contained in any CCE in connection with possible threats from the IFP side. A few scenarios are depicted in this paper to show that an IFP can easily establish a connection with one or many VM(s) of a CCE and can violate the basic principles of CIA. In view of this, we have also proposed a few techniques in this paper to make the CSP and end user forensically ready so that such system can raise an immediate alert only when an unauthorized connection is established by a host towards its VM(s).