Cloud Forensics Challenges and Readiness

Cloud Forensics is an emerging topic in the Digital Forensics context. It concerns with the management of digital crimes in the Cloud Computing environment. The specific characteristics of Cloud Computing determine new challenges for practitioners and researchers dealing with Cloud crimes. In this paper, we discuss the impact of Cloud Computing into the Digital Forensics field and the relation between the specific Cloud Computing features with the challenges they provide from the forensics point of view taking into account technical, organizational, and legal dimensions. An approach for conducting proactive investigations and at the same time improving Cloud security is based on the development of a Cloud Forensic Readiness System, meant to collect and store data coming from the Cloud infrastructure to be then exploited for conducting digital crimes investigations more effectively. A reference architecture for such a system is described.