Forensics-as-a-Service (FaaS): Computer Forensic Workflow Management and Processing Using Cloud
Yuanfeng Wen, Xiaoxi Man, Khoa Le, Weidong Larry Shi · 2013
Abstract—Digital forensics is a critical technology for obtaining evidences in crime investigation. Nowadays, the overwhelming magnitude of data and the lack of easy-to-deploy software are among the major obstacles in the field of digital forensics. Cloud computing, which is designed to support large scale data pro-cessing on commodity hardware, provides a solution. However, to support forensic examination efficiently using cloud, one has to overcome many challenges such as lack of understanding and experiences on configuring and using digital forensic analytic tools by the investigators, and lack of interoperability among the forensic data processing software. To address these challenges and to leverage the emerging trends of service based computing, we proposed and experimented with a domain specific cloud environment for supporting forensic applications. We designed a cloud based framework for dealing with large volume of forensic data, sharing interoperable forensic software, and providing tools for forensic investigators to create and customize forensic data processing workflows. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches can significantly reduce forensic data analysis time by parallelizing the workload. The overhead for the investigators to design and configure complex forensic workflows is greatly minimized. The proposed workflow management solu-tion can save up to 87 % of analysis time in the tested scenarios. Keywords—cloud computing; digital forensics I.