Traditionally, much of Digital Forensics has been focused on standalone or smaller networked systems. However, the increasing use of cloud-based architectures and big data systems is challenging established Digital Forensics methods. As criminals make use of cloud storage, forensic investigators need methods to acquire and analyse artefacts from the cloud. Exploring solutions for the technical and legal challenges posed is the first objective of this track. Secondly, as corporations continue to adopt Big Data technologies and store increasingly valuable data in distributed systems and the cloud, this is becoming an expanding target for criminals. The question therefore is not if, but when, the first major Big Data security breach will happen. In such an event, the large data volumes, non-traditional architecture and remote cloud storage, often using distributed file systems and/or NoSQL, pose serious challenges for Incident Response. With established approaches infeasible in such situations, the development of methods for the forensic analysis of compromised cloud and distributed systems is therefore paramount, and the second objective of this track. Finally, cloud and distributed systems could potentially offer new approaches and solutions to the forensic data volume problem. In addition to offering vast data storage for forensic images, related technologies such as machine learning, Big Data Analytics, and distributed processing could be leveraged to help with forensic data analysis. Examples of emerging concepts in this regard include DFaaS (Digital Forensics as a Service). Advancing such techniques is the third objective of this special track.

Publication

• Papers will be indexed by Thomson Reuters in WoS (Web of Science)

• Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals: http://www.iariajournals.org 

• Print proceedings will be available via Curran Associates, Inc.: http://www.proceedings.com/9769.html 

• Articles will be archived in the free access ThinkMind Digital Library: http://www.thinkmind.org