Shams Zawoad

Shams Zawoad, Amit Kumar Dutta, Ragib Hasan

Cloud computing has emerged as a popular computing paradigm in recent years. However, today's cloud computing architectures often lack support for computer forensic investigations. Analyzing various logs (e.g., process logs, network logs) plays a vital role in computer forensics. Unfortunately, collecting logs from a cloud is very hard given the black-box nature of clouds and the multi-tenant cloud models, where many users share the same processing and network resources. Researchers have proposed using log API or cloud management console to mitigate the challenges of collecting logs from cloud infrastructure. However, there has been no concrete work, which shows how to provide cloud logs to investigator while preserving users' privacy and integrity of the logs. In this paper, we introduce Secure-Logging-as-a-Service (SecLaaS), which stores virtual machines' logs and provides access to forensic investigators ensuring the confidentiality of the cloud users. Additionally, SeclaaS preserves proofs of past log and thus protects the integrity of the logs from dishonest investigators or cloud providers. Finally, we evaluate the feasibility of the scheme by implementing SecLaaS for network access logs in OpenStack - a popular open source cloud platform.

Shams Zawoad, Ragib Hasan

In recent years, cloud computing has become popular as a cost-effective and efficient computing paradigm. Unfortunately, today's cloud computing architectures are not designed for security and forensics. To date, very little research has been done to develop the theory and practice of cloud forensics. Many factors complicate forensic investigations in a cloud environment. First, the storage system is no longer local. Therefore, even with a subpoena, law enforcement agents cannot confiscate the suspect's computer and get access to the suspect's files. Second, each cloud server contains files from many users. Hence, it is not feasible to seize servers from a data center without violating the privacy of many other users. Third, even if the data belonging to a particular suspect is identified, separating it from other users' data is difficult. Moreover, other than the cloud provider's word, there is usually no evidence that links a given data file to a particular suspect. For such challenges, clouds cannot be used to store healthcare, business, or national security related data, which require audit and regulatory compliance. In this paper, we systematically examine the cloud forensics problem and explore the challenges and issues in cloud forensics. We then discuss existing research projects and finally, we highlight the open problems and future directions in cloud forensics research area. We posit that our systematic approach towards understanding the nature and challenges of cloud forensics will allow us to examine possible secure solution approaches, leading to increased trust on and adoption of cloud computing, especially in business, healthcare, and national security. This in turn will lead to lower cost and long-term benefit to our society as a whole.

Shams Zawoad, Ragib Hasan

With the proliferation of wireless networks, mobile devices and medical devices are increasingly being equipped with wireless interfaces, such as Bluetooth and WiFi to allow easy access to and control of the medical devices. Unfortunately, the very presence and usage of such interfaces also expose the medical devices to novel attacks from malicious parties. The emerging threat from malicious mobile devices is significant and severe, since attackers can steal confidential data from a patient's medical device. Also, attackers can compromise the medical device and either feed doctors bad data from it or issue potentially fatal commands to the device, which may even result in the death of the patient. As the mobile devices are often at close proximity to the patient (either in the hospital or home settings), attacks from such devices are hard to prevent. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of this new threat from mobile devices on medical devices and healthcare infrastructure. We also perform a thorough security analysis of a major hospital and uncover potential vulnerabilities. Finally, we propose a set of potential solutions and defenses against such attacks.