Security, Privacy, and Digital Forensics in the Cloud

16Forensics‐as‐a‐Service (FaaS) in the State‐of‐the‐Art Cloud

Avinash Srinivasan¹ and Frank Ferrese²

¹ Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

² Electrical and Computer Engineering, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

16.1 Introduction

Advances and fundamental changes in the computing and communications industries have resulted in significant challenges to current digital forensic analysis practices, policies, and regulations. Consequently, the forensic analysis process is suffering from significant roadblocks not only from unclear cyberlaws and regulations, but also as a result of significant technology challenges. Integrity is the key requirement in the forensic analysis process. To further complicate matters, computer forensic analysis is fundamentally a serial process. Therefore, inherent scalability challenges exist. Most importantly, the ability to withstand the Daubert test during the trial is pivotal to designing parallel and distributed forensic analysis tools (Ball 2017). In light of this web of challenges, case backlogs are growing at an increasing rate. As noted in (Hitchcock et al. 2016), the backlog is commonly in the order of 6–18 months, but can reach significantly higher numbers in some jurisdictions.

One instance of a key paradigm shift in the computing industry is the advent of cloud computing. In recent years, cloud computing capabilities have advanced significantly and evolved from a mere plausible concept to hard ...