Conclusions

The rapid increase in new cloud services and their popularity will, in future, lead to systems, applications, or accounts being compromised in the cloud. Attackers are always at the leading edge of technology and are fully aware of the potential that cloud environments offer [11]. The challenge is thus to support forensic processes for cloud environments, which necessitates cooperation between the customer and the CSP.

The issues examined in this article show that traditional methods and processes of digital forensics must be reconsidered, especially in terms of forensic investigations in cloud environments. It is primarily the task of the scientific community to develop new methods and processes that address the issue of forensics in the cloud.

That said, the CSPs really need to do their homework. Unfortunately, most CSPs currently don’t see the potential that an interface of this kind offers to the user. This is perhaps less an issue of technical feasibility and more an issue of the financial overhead that such an implementation would cause for the CSP. The costs of the implementation could be passed on to the customer – if you want this kind of interface, you have to pay for it.

This approach is not unusual: Security costs money, and CSPs don’t initially earn anything with it. As long as users allow CSPs to get away with this behavior, nothing is likely to change.

When CSPs start to depend on users, rather than vice versa, a paradigm change might occur. Until that happens, it remains to be hoped that the security mechanisms provided by the CSP and complemented by the customers’ own mechanisms are robust enough to survive.

Info

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[11] Attackers Using Amazon Cloud to Host Malware