Beyond digital forensics. A cloud computing perspective over incident response and reporting

Abstract

Cloud computing represents a different paradigm in distributed computing that involves more and more researchers. In this context, we can see that there is a need for knowing where and when a certain data is processed or stored. Compared with classic digital forensic, the field of cloud forensic poses a lot of difficulties since data is not stored on a single storage unit and furthermore it involves the use of virtualization technologies. In this paper we will present in detail a new and novel way of monitoring user activity in cloud environments using a secure cloud forensic framework. We talk about the architecture of such framework and we emphasize the way in which our research can be applied on top of new or existing cloud infrastructures. Also, for testing purposes, we have applied our findings over our previous developed cloud computing framework.