Internet plays a vital role in providing various services to people all over the world. Its usage has been increasing tremendously over the years. In order to provide services efficiently at a low cost, cloud computing has emerged as one of the prominent technologies. It provides on-demand services to the users by allocating virtual instances and software services, thereby reducing customer’s operating cost. The availability of massive computation power and storage facilities at very low cost motivates a malicious individual or an attacker to launch attacks from machines either from inside or outside the cloud. This causes high resource consumption and also results in prolonged unavailability of cloud services. This chapter surveys the systematic analysis of the forensic process, challenges in cloud forensics, and in particular the data collection techniques in the cloud environment. Data collection techniques play a major role to identify the source of attacks by acquiring evidence from various sources such as cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft SkyDrive), cloud log analysis, Web browser, and through physical evidence acquisition process.
Part of the book: Digital Forensic Science