Forensic investigation of P2P cloud storage services and backbone for IoT networks

In recent years, technology has become truly pervasive in everyday life. Technological advancement can be found in many facets of life, including personal computers, mobile devices, wearables, cloud services, video gaming, web-powered messaging, social media, Internet-connected devices, etc. This technological influence has resulted in these technologies being employed by criminals to conduct a range of crimes — both online and offline. Both the number of cases requiring digital forensic analysis and the sheer volume of information to be processed in each case has increased rapidly in recent years. As a result, the requirement for digital forensic investigation has ballooned, and law enforcement agencies throughout the world are scrambling to address this demand. While more and more members of law enforcement are being trained to perform the required investigations, the supply is not keeping up with the demand. Current digital forensic techniques are arduously time-consuming and require a significant amount of man power to execute. This paper discusses a novel solution to combat the digital forensic backlog. This solution leverages a deduplication-based paradigm to eliminate the reacquisition, redundant storage, and reanalysis of previously processed data.

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Battling the digital forensic backlog through data deduplication

Cloud Computing is a commonly used, yet ambiguous term, which can be used to refer to a multitude of differing dynamically allocated services. From a law enforcement and forensic investigation perspective, cloud computing can be thought of as a double edged sword. While on one hand, the gathering of digital evidence from cloud sources can bring with it complicated technical and cross-jurisdictional legal challenges. On the other, the employment of cloud storage and processing capabilities can expedite the forensics process and focus the investigation onto pertinent data earlier in an investigation. This paper examines the state-of-the-art in cloud-focused, digital forensic practises for the collection and analysis of evidence and an overview of the potential use of cloud technologies to provide Digital Forensics as a Service.

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Overview of the Forensic Investigation of Cloud Services

Researchers envisioned Storage as a Service (StaaS) as an effective solution to the distributed management of digital data. Cooperative storage cloud forensic is relatively new and is an under-explored area of research. Using Symform as a case study, we seek to determine the data remnants from the use of cooperative cloud storage services. In particular, we consider both mobile devices and personal computers running various popular operating systems, namely Windows 8.1, Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.5, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, iOS 7.1.2, and Android KitKat 4.4.4. Potential artefacts recovered during the research include data relating to the installation and uninstallation of the cloud applications, log-in to and log-out from Symform account using the client application, file synchronization as well as their time stamp information. This research contributes to an in-depth understanding of the types of terrestrial artifacts that are likely to remain after the use of cooperative storage cloud on client devices.

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Forensic Investigation of Cooperative Storage Cloud Service: Symform as a Case Study.

Summary
The significant increase in the volume, variety, and velocity of data complicates cloud forensic efforts, and such (big) evidential data will, at some point, become too (computationally) expensive to be fully identified, collected, and analysed in a timely manner. Thus, it is important for digital forensic practitioners to have an up-to-date knowledge of relevant data artefacts that could be forensically recovered from the cloud product under investigation. In this paper, CloudMe, a popular cloud storage service, is studied. The types and locations of the artefacts relating to the installation and uninstallation of CloudMe client application, logging in and out, and file synchronization events from the computer desktop and mobile clients are described. Findings from this research will also help inform future development of tools and techniques (e.g., data mining techniques) for cloud-enabled big data endpoint forensics investigation.

CloudMe forensics: A case of big data forensic investigation

6th International Conference on Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime (ICDF2C 2014), New Haven, Connecticut, United States, 18-20 September 2014

/pdf/leveraging-decentralization-to-extend-the-digital-evidence-j319eop53u.pdf

Leveraging Decentralization to Extend the Digital Evidence Acquisition Window: Case Study on Bittorrent Sync

File synchronization services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, etc., are becoming increasingly popular in today's always-connected world. A popular alternative to the aforementioned services is BitTorrent Sync. This is a decentralized/cloudless file synchronization service and is gaining significant popularity among Internet users with privacy concerns over where their data is stored and who has the ability to access it. The focus of this paper is the remote recovery of digital evidence pertaining to files identified as being accessed or stored on a suspect's computer or mobile device. A methodology for the identification, investigation, recovery and verification of such remote digital evidence is outlined. Finally, a proof-of-concept remote evidence recovery from BitTorrent Sync shared folder highlighting a number of potential scenarios for the recovery and verification of such evidence.

Nhien An Le Khac

Papers

Leveraging Decentralization to Extend the Digital Evidence Acquisition Window: Case Study on Bittorrent Sync

Leveraging Decentralization to Extend the Digital Evidence Acquisition Window: Case Study on BitTorrent Sync