Emerging from The Cloud: A Bibliometric Analysis of Cloud Forensics Studies

TL;DR

This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of cloud forensics research from 2009 to 2016, identifying trends, key areas, and challenges in developing forensic tools and procedures for cloud platforms.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive bibliometric study of cloud forensics research trends and classifies the forensic process to highlight main research areas and remaining challenges.

Findings

Identified key research trends from 2009 to 2016

Classified cloud forensics processes and tools

Highlighted unresolved challenges in cloud forensics

Abstract

The emergence of cloud computing technologies has changed the way we store, retrieve, and archive our data. With the promise of unlimited, reliable and always-available storage, a lot of private and confidential data are now stored on different cloud platforms. Being such a gold mine of data, cloud platforms are among the most valuable targets for attackers. Therefore, many forensics investigators have tried to develop tools, tactics and procedures to collect, preserve, analyse and report evidences of attackers activities on different cloud platforms. Despite the number of published articles there is not a bibliometric study that presents cloud forensics research trends. This paper aims to address this problem by providing a comprehensive assessment of cloud forensics research trends between 2009 and 2016. Moreover, we provide a classification of cloud forensics process to detect the most profound research areas and highlight remaining challenges.