Cloud forensics and digital ledger investigation: a new era of forensics investigation

Nowadays, cloud computing has gained popularity because it provides a platform for pay-as-you-go services, including hardware, software, and operating environment. However, technological resources cannot only be shared, but allocated on-demand to various users. With the emerged rate of inevitable vulnerabilities and network crime activities all over the globe, cybercriminals targets cloud environments. So, the demand for digital investigation is increased drastically. These extreme challenges pose serious issues for the cloud investigation. It has an impact on the researcher community of digital forensics as well. The cloud service providers and customers have yet to establish adequate forensics capacity and support digital forensics investigations on cybercrime activities in the cloud. In this paper, we present a digital forensics-enabled cloud investigation framework. In addition, we survey previous related works based on existing cloud forensics practices, fog forensics, edge forensics, and law and highlight the significant role of cloud computing in digital forensics. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges and limitations along with the future directions.