Date of Award

Summer 8-2015

Degree Type

Thesis-Restricted

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Program

Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Major Professor

Vassil Roussev

Second Advisor

Golden G. Richard III

Third Advisor

Irfan Ahmed

Abstract

Cloud computing and cloud storage services, in particular, pose a new challenge to digital forensic investigations. Currently, evidence acquisition for such services still follows the traditional approach of collecting artifacts on a client device. In this work, we show that such an approach not only requires upfront substantial investment in reverse engineering each service, but is also inherently incomplete as it misses prior versions of the artifacts, as well as cloud-only artifacts that do not have standard serialized representations on the client.

In this work, we introduce the concept of API-based evidence acquisition for cloud services, which addresses these concerns by utilizing the officially supported API of the service. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we present a proof-of-concept acquisition tool, kumodd, which can acquire evidence from four major cloud storage providers: Google Drive, Microsoft One, Dropbox, and Box. The implementation provides both command-line and web user interfaces, and can be readily incorporated into established forensic processes.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.

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