Research Area:  Digital Forensics

Abstract:

Smartphones have become popular in recent days due to the accessibility of a wide range of applications. These sophisticated applications demand more computing resources in a resource constraint smartphone. Cloud computing is the motivating factor for the progress of these applications. The emerging mobile cloud computing introduces a new architecture to offload smartphone and utilize cloud computing technology to solve resource requirements. The popularity of mobile cloud computing is an opportunity for misuse and unlawful activities. Therefore, it is a challenging platform for digital forensic investigations due to the non-availability of methodologies, tools and techniques. The aim of this work is to analyze the forensic tools and methodologies for crime investigation in a mobile cloud platform as it poses challenges in proving the evidence.Mobile cloud environment utilizes unlimited resources offered by a cloud computing in a resource constraint mobile environment (Liu, Jain, Hu, Zhao, & Zhang, 2009). Mobile Cloud computing is a combination of two new emerging information technology worlds. The motive of the mobile cloud computing concept is to make use of the computing power of the cloud environment and make it available to the mobile devices in order to solve the challenges in a mobile environment. In recently developed mobile cloud architecture, mobile devices can access cloud services either through ad-hoc mobile network or access points (Khan, Othman, Madani, & Khan, 2013). Smartphones are enhanced with powerful hardware in recent years. However, device energy, network connectivity, bandwidth utilization, and mobility are the major constraints for smartphones. The usage of Smartphones has since skyrocketed as it offers several attractive facilities such as surfing the Internet, checking e-mails, video-conferencing, accessing social websites, road navigation, and editing documents. Blackberry, iPhone, and Android Smartphones are most popular in the mobile market.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Muhammad Faheem, Tahar Kechad and Nhien An Le-Khac

Publisher name:  IGI Global

DOI:  10.4018/ijdcf.2015040101

Volume Information:  Pages: 19

Paper Link:   https://www.igi-global.com/article/the-state-of-the-art-forensic-techniques-in-mobile-cloud-environment/132965