NIST Considers Technical Challenges of Tracking Data in the Cloud

Grazed from NIST. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a draft report summarizing 65 challenges that cloud computing poses to forensics investigators, and the report considered technical challenges related to keeping track of data in the cloud, something federal agencies are increasingly being confronted by.

The task of keeping track of and protecting agency data in the cloud overlaps with forensic investigation in some areas such as the chain of custody of data, and it’s worth considering the fundamental challenges. “Decentralization of logs among different layers, accessibility of logs, the multi-tenancy nature of clouds, and preserving the chain of custody make log analysis challenging in clouds,” the report notes, for example…

The challenges fall into nine categories such as architecture, data collection, analysis, standards, training and "anti-forensics" such as data hiding and malware – and need to be understood to develop technology and standards-based mitigation approaches, says the report (which has the challenges broken out in a spreadsheet in the appendix), available here: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/nistir-8006/draft_nistir_8006.pdf