A Heuristic Model for Performing Digital Forensics in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing is a relatively new model in the computing world after several computing paradigms like personal, ubiquitous, grid, mobile, and utility computing. Cloud computing is synonymous with virtualization which is about creating virtual versions of the hardware platform, the Operating System or the storage devices. Virtualization poses challenges to implementation of security as well as cybercrime investigation in the cloud. Although several researchers have contributed in identifying digital forensic challenges and methods of performing digital forensic analysis in the cloud computing environment, we feel that the requirement of finding the most appropriate methods to evaluate the uncertainty in the digital evidence is a must. This paper emphasizes on the methods of finding and analyzing digital evidence in cloud computing environment with respect to the cloud user as well as the provider. We propose a heuristic model for performing digital forensics in the cloud environment.