Scenario-based Design for a Cloud Forensics Portal

Cloud computing continues to transform how we address security challenges in closed and private networks. Given the advanced functionality offered by cloud computing, network monitoring and digital forensics efforts are potentially detectable and service interruptive which affects the effectiveness and thoroughness of digital forensic methods. Virtualization, the cost-effective delivery platform for clouds and data centers, provides an opportunity for Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) through the hypervisor. VMI would be an environment to monitor the activity of a Virtual Machine (VM). In this paper, we propose a multi-phase scenario-based design concept within an open source virtualized environment to collect data to validate the hypervisor's ability to provide a portal for threat monitoring that is effective, undetectable, and non-interruptive.