Identification of Potential Forensic Artifacts in Cloud Storage Application

Cloud storage services possess the majority portion of the cloud market. Its exponential growth represents the continuous storage of public and personal information to the remote location over the cloud for on-the-go availability. However, cloud storage services also attract criminals due to low-cost on- demand resources. In the case of SaaS applications, the cloud service providers control all the underlying hardware and execution environment of the application. Forensic investigators must depend upon the cooperation of CSP for evidence identification and collection. This is the reason that forensics of cloud storage application become an obstacle as well as an opportunity for forensic researchers and examiners. In this paper, we focus on the identification of potential forensic artifacts for a single SaaS application: Dropbox