A Case Study on Digital Forensics in the Cloud

Cloud computing and cloud forensics are probably the two most popular and debated IT topics in recent years, implying relevant technological and economic opportunities, the former, and open issues such as the ability to perform digital investigations in the cloud, the latter. In cloud forensics, the distributed nature of data processing in the cloud and the lack of physical access to digital artifacts on the server side represent, indeed, a serious concern for investigators and stakeholders, as traditional approaches to evidence collection and recovery may be no longer applicable. In this paper we discuss technical aspects of digital forensics in cloud computing environments and present results of a case study about user-cloud interaction, aimed at assessing whether existing digital forensics techniques are still applicable to cloud investigations. We conclude proposing a new methodology for automatic cloud-based artifact categorization as a future work.