Cloud forensic investigation: A sneak-peek into acquisition

The popularity and usage of the cloud for both commercial and non-commercial purposes has grown exceptionally. This triggered researchers around the world to focus on performing forensic investigation in cloud environment. Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology had collected, categorized and listed various architectural, acquisition, analysis and legal issues in cloud forensics. In this paper, we focus on the challenges involved in acquisition phase. We developed a tool to acquire virtual machine evidences from the cloud. An investigator who is using our tool can acquire at least one of the three major evidences (virtual memory, virtual disk and service logs) by preserving corresponding evidence integrity. Basically, the tool can be used either by the cloud provider or by the investigator (external/internal). The results shown in this paper are specific to openstack cloud but the methodology used can be extended to other cloud platforms as well.