The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued the final version of its Cloud Computing Forensic Reference Architecture designed to enable the rapid data collection of evidence in cloud computing environments at minimal investigation costs.
The 31-page document, filed as NIST Special Publication 800-201, pinpoints and addresses the challenges of cloud forensics, including information integrity and privacy issues in the data collection process.
The publication builds upon the 62 cloud-related forensic challenges enumerated in a NIST report issued in August 2020.
To help users understand the cloud computing forensic process, the guidebook provides a reference architecture identifying the challenges that require mitigation strategies and recommending ways to apply the approaches.
The reference guide works as a methodology and an initial implementation step useful for cloud system professionals, forensic investigators and cloud consumers to check the forensic readiness of their cloud computing architectures.
NIST encourages users to customize the guidebook’s implementation based on their specific conditions and requirements.
The NIST Cloud Computing Forensic Science Working Group performed the research for the cloud computing forensic reference.
