Emerging Trends in Mobile and Cloud Digital Forensics A Survey

Abstract

From its beginnings in computer disc analysis, digital forensics has greatly expanded to include a variety of fields, such as mobile, cloud, network, database, and multimedia forensics. The article provides a comprehensive review of the latest digital forensic methods with emphasis on mobile and cloud forensics. We reach the conclusion that cloud forensics is still at an early stage of development and its tools suffer from basic problems of abstraction, volatility, and scalability, whereas the tools for mobile forensics, such as CAINE and EnCase, are relatively mature and reliable. As a result of the new containerized environment enabled by Docker and Kubernetes, there is now a ‘race to acquisition' problem as the temporary evidence is being lost and deleted automatically. The findings from our investigation throw light on key areas where explainable automated analysis, Forensic-as-a-Service frameworks, and cross-cloud evidence correlation still have a long way to go. Through product, performance and functional indicators we conduct comparison of forensic tools and propose future avenues of forensic research, which include proactive forensic readiness programmers and zero-trust forensic frameworks.