Digital Forensic Approach for Investigation of Cybercrimes in Private Cloud Environment

Cloud computing is a revolutionary technology that provide computing and storage resources as a service accessible via network connections. Cloud computing has two foremost models which are services and deployment. One of the significant deployment models is a private cloud which is used by large organizations for building a corporate cloud inside their internal departments to provide computing services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They adopted the internal private cloud to reduce cost and save time. In last decades, number of severe attacks and threats against the private cloud is increasing which make it facing complex challenges in the security province so that a forensic approach for cybercrime investigation should be systematized. Therefore, this paper presents a digital forensic approach for investigation of cybercrimes in a private cloud environment. Here, focus on using virtualization technology solutions from VMware for building experimental environment. From the experiment analysis, the proposed approach can help digital investigators and practitioners in acquisition and collection of digital evidence from the private cloud infrastructures especially virtual machine which is considered the core element of virtualized cloud systems.