Forensics as a Service: Three-Tier Architecture for Cloud Based Forensic Analysis

摘要

Digital forensics is becoming very challenging because of three main reasons: 1) Highly distributed systems under multiple jurisdictions, 2) Big Data handling and 3) Lack of forensic services, in a cloud computing environment. Due to these obstacles, all the digital investigations are becoming time consuming that makes the solutions more expensive. Cloud computing is capable of handling these challenges, but it lacks an architectural level support for forensic analysis that can meet all the legal requirements. Cloud service providers cannot provide solutions to these challenges by offering forensics tools on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. In this paper, we propose a multi-tier cloud architecture for Forensics-as-a-Service (FaaS) capable of handling the aforementioned challenges and introducing a new infrastructure-level forensic support from cloud providers. We will also discuss the improvement in time and cost efficiency of the overall investigation process.