What’s in the Cloud? - An examination of the impact of cloud storage usage on the browser cache

Abstract

Cloud storage is now a well established and popular service adopted by many individuals and organizations, often at a scaled cost, with free accounts also available. It provides users with the ability to store content on a cloud service provider’s infrastructure, offering the benefit of redundancy, reliability, security, the flexibility of access, and the potential assumed the liability of the provider for data loss within the contexts of a licensing agreement. Consequently, this form of remote storage provides a regulatory challenge as content which once resided upon a seized digital exhibit, available for scrutiny during a digital forensic investigatory, may no longer be present where attempting to acquire access to it creates costing and juridical difficulties. This article offers a digital forensic examination of trace-evidence left in the Internet browser cache following cloud storage account usage and interaction. Following interactions with Dropbox and Google Drive in the Chrome browser, testing demonstrates the possibility to recover data capable of facilitating a partial reconstruction of a user’s cloud storage account, with results offered and contextualized.