Calm Before the Storm: The Challenges of Cloud Computing in Digital Forensics
It addresses the problem of adapting digital forensics to cloud environments for investigators and organizations, but is incremental as it summarizes issues without proposing solutions.
This paper analyzes how cloud computing invalidates established digital forensic procedures, identifying new research challenges for investigators, law enforcement, and compliance departments.
Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed.