Analysis of Cloud Forensics Techniques for Emerging Technologies

Cloud computing is the technology of the modern era having invaluable features that convince enterprises to adopt. It provides opportunities to the enterprises to compete with their opponents, to facilitate their customers, and grow up their day to day business by reducing cost and infrastructure management burden. Regardless of the enormous features offered by cloud computing, enterprises generally hesitate to adopt it due to the physical inaccessibility and deployment of their intellectual properties to a location that is unknown to them. On the other hand, the cyber-criminals sniffing around to find the loopholes to breach in, and compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resources managed by Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Cloud Systems (CPCS) where the data is processed and stored in the cloud environment, demands the need to tighten up the security of the cloud itself. Identifying and tracing the source of a cyber-attack plays an integral role in the investigation process. Digital forensics in the cloud termed Cloud Forensics which boosts the confidence of the stack holders by reconstructing the past cloud events to give a hypothetical view of the crime scene and describe how the malicious activity had happened? The collection of evidence especially in the cloud environment is the most complex task due to its scattered architecture. Moreover, the collected evidence was used for the investigation to shield the cloud environment from a future security breach and bring the cybercriminal to the court of justice. In this paper, we have presented an analysis of cloud forensics techniques and their practical challenges/limitations to cope with cloud forensic investigators.