Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

14Digital Evidence Management, Presentation, and Court Preparation in the Cloud: A Forensic Readiness Approach

Lucia De Marco, Nhien‐An Le‐Khac, and M‐Tahar Kechadi

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

14.1 Introduction

In the modern IT era, computation capability is delivered through computing services. This name became popular with the public when the Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services (SOA‐WS) spread in the 1990s (Alonso et al. 2004). The concept of delivering IT and computation capabilities through a network dates back to the late 1960s. In 1969, J.C.R. Licklider, who contributed to the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), promoted the concept of an intergalactic computer network (Lee et al. 1992). Such a scientist had a vision and a hope that in the future every individual would have access to data and applications from anywhere. In 1961, the computer pioneer John McCarthy predicted that computation may someday be organized as a public utility (Foster et al. 2008).

Cloud computing service architecture is designed to provide a computing environment that utilizes virtual resources that dynamically allocate the underlying physical resources. The result is to balance the load and to scale resource provisioning up and down in order to guarantee some services execution that satisfy the needs of the end users. Cloud services can be seen as an evolution of SOA‐WS services; the Cloud is taking their advantages to build its service ...