Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
WIREs Forensic Science
Publisher
Wiley
School
School of Science / ECU Security Research Institute
RAS ID
32357
Funders
Funding information : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wfs2.1372
Abstract
A Cloud Forensic Readiness as a Service (CFRaaS) model allows an environment to preemptively accumulate relevant potential digital evidence (PDE) which may be needed during a post‐event response process. The benefit of applying a CFRaaS model in a cloud environment, is that, it is designed to prevent the modification/tampering of the cloud architectures or the infrastructure during the reactive process, which if it could, may end up having far‐reaching implications. The authors of this article present the reactive process as a very costly exercise when the infrastructure must be reprogrammed every time the process is conducted. This may hamper successful investigation from the forensic experts and law enforcement agencies perspectives. The CFRaaS model, in its current state, has not been presented in a way that can help to classify or visualize the different types of potential evidence in all the cloud deployable models, and this may limit the expectations of what or how the required PDE may be collected. To address this problem, the article presents the CFRaaS from a holistic ontology‐driven perspective, which allows the forensic experts to be able to apply the CFRaaS based on its simplicity of the concepts, relationship or semantics between different form of potential evidence, as well as how the security of a digital environment being investigated could be upheld. The CFRaaS in this context follows a fundamental ontology engineering approach that is based on the classical Resource Description Framework. The proposed ontology‐driven approach to CFRaaS is, therefore, a knowledge‐base that uses layer‐dependencies, which could be an essential toolkit for digital forensic examiners and other stakeholders in cloud‐security. The implementation of this approach could further provide a platform to develop other knowledge base components for cloud forensics and security.
DOI
10.1002/wfs2.1372
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Kebande, V. R., Karie, N. M., Ikuesan, R. A., & Venter, H. S. (2020). Ontology-driven perspectives of CFRaaS. WIREs Forensic Science, 2(5), article e1372. https://doi.org/10.1002/wfs2.1372