Greening Cloud-Enabled Big Data Storage Forensics: Syncany as a Case Study

TL;DR

This paper investigates forensic artefacts in Syncany private cloud storage, identifying data remnants that can aid digital investigations and reduce investigation time and resource expenditure.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of forensic artefacts in Syncany, a popular cloud storage engine, highlighting their types and locations for forensic recovery.

Findings

Identified key data remnants of forensic value in Syncany.

Mapped locations of artefacts for forensic recovery.

Contributed to understanding cloud storage forensics.

Abstract

The pervasive nature of cloud-enabled big data storage solutions introduces new challenges in the identification, collection, analysis, preservation and archiving of digital evidences. Investigation of such complex platforms to locate and recover traces of criminal activities is a time-consuming process. Hence, cyber forensics researchers are moving towards streamlining the investigation process by locating and documenting residual artefacts (evidences) of forensic value of users activities on cloud-enabled big data platforms in order to reduce the investigation time and resources involved in a real-world investigation. In this paper, we seek to determine the data remnants of forensic value from Syncany private cloud storage service, a popular storage engine for big data platforms. We demonstrate the types and the locations of the artefacts that can be forensically recovered. Findings from this research contribute to an in-depth understanding of cloud-enabled big data storage forensics, which can result in reduced time and resources spent in real-world investigations involving Syncany-based cloud platforms.