Transparent Log Collection And Evidence Tracking: Digital Forensics In Cloud Environment

Nowadays,cloud computing has become an emerging and widely used technology throughout the world on account of its dynamic,reliable and customizable quality of service.However,at the same time,cloud computing faces major concerns due to its architectural characteristics regardless of the technological changes that have made it a viable solution.A large amount of popularity and utility of the cloud environment has made it the soft target of cloud crimes.The security problem of the cloud environment is attracted more and more attention from academia and industry.In many concerns regarding cloud computing security,the digital forensic is a hot topic.Investigating cloud crimes and fixing the responsibility of the cyber-crimes committed in the cloud platforms help instill confidence and trust on the stakeholders.However,due to distributed nature of cloud computing,the data is stored globally all over the world.Furthermore,the dynamic and remote data access makes data relocation from one data center to another,therefore,data maybe consistently resized and compressed.Thus,it may possible that maybe data losing throughout the transmission of data,or it may wrap by attacks into the cloud environment.Moreover,unnecessary storage and various jurisdiction and a shortage of real-time transparent information about data location introduce legal judicial issues and additional compilations for digital investigation.As well virtualization makes an effect on the privacy of other cloud user's.This research is identifying and analyzes the data and information security for cloud users and helping the digital forensic investigators for collecting the user logs information from a cloud environment.The proposed system which is used in this research is based on Host-Based Intrusion Detection System.The purpose of this research is to design a standard digital forensics framework for the investigation against cloud criminals by identifying the forensic requirement and challenges in the virtualized cloud environment.Compared with traditional digital forensic on common digital devices and hardware,it is difficult to implement digital forensics in the cloud because it is very hard to collect logs from a cloud environment.In this research,we have designed a new system to address the issue of digital forensics in a cloud environment.We use a new architecture to help investigators performing the log collection.Firstly,a Host-based Intrusion Detection System(HIDS)is introduced to secure the data in the cloud from malicious attacks of intruders.Then,based on the feedback results of HIDS,one web server generates notification alerts and Secure Shell(SSH)message to restrict further suspicious activities.Finally,the digital forensic investigators can identify the user and collect reliable evidence of suspected user.In this way,HIDS and log collection will be a significant part of digital forensics in a cloud environment.