Data acquisition in the cloud

With an exponentially increasing usage of cloud services, the need for forensic investigations of virtual space is equally in constantly increasing demand, which includes as a very first approach, the gaining of access to it as well as the data stored. This is an aspect that faces a number of challenges, stemming not only from the technical difficulties and peculiarities, but equally covers the interaction with an emerging line of businesses offering cloud storage and services. Typically, in order to acquire data in the Cloud environments, digital investigators should firstly locate relevant Cloud’s data centres. However, hosting provider cannot be trusted with details of the involved computer host. Indeed, law enforcement members need to understand the essential requirements, governance related to the Cloud service providers. Finally, efficient approach and techniques for forensic acquisition and analysis data in the Cloud platforms are still missing. Therefore, in this chapter, we present different aspects related to the challenges of data acquisition in the Cloud. We describe firstly legal perspectives related to Cloud service providers. Next, we also discuss on how to locate the data centre where the computer host of the investigators interest is running and we also propose an efficient approach to tackle this challenge. Finally, we show a forensic acquisition and analysis of a popular Cloud storage platform: Amazon web service. Our approaches are also experimented with real-world scenarios.