Book Image

Cloud Forensics Demystified

By : Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Mansoor Haqanee
Book Image

Cloud Forensics Demystified

By: Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Mansoor Haqanee

Overview of this book

As organizations embrace cloud-centric environments, it becomes imperative for security professionals to master the skills of effective cloud investigation. Cloud Forensics Demystified addresses this pressing need, explaining how to use cloud-native tools and logs together with traditional digital forensic techniques for a thorough cloud investigation. The book begins by giving you an overview of cloud services, followed by a detailed exploration of the tools and techniques used to investigate popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Progressing through the chapters, you’ll learn how to investigate Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and containerized environments such as Kubernetes. Throughout, the chapters emphasize the significance of the cloud, explaining which tools and logs need to be enabled for investigative purposes and demonstrating how to integrate them with traditional digital forensic tools and techniques to respond to cloud security incidents. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to handle security breaches in cloud-based environments and have a comprehensive understanding of the essential cloud-based logs vital to your investigations. This knowledge will enable you to swiftly acquire and scrutinize artifacts of interest in cloud security incidents.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Cloud Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Forensic Readiness: Tools, Techniques, and Preparation for Cloud Forensics
10
Part 3: Cloud Forensic Analysis – Responding to an Incident in the Cloud

GCP IAM

IAM provides a framework for controlling resource access within the GCP realm by defining the relationships between identities, roles, and the corresponding resources. Within this system, the concept of resources extends to include a wide array of entities, such as GCE VM instances, GKE clusters, Cloud Storage buckets, and the organizational structure consisting of organizations, folders, and projects.

IAM operates on the principle that direct access permissions are not granted to end users; instead, permissions are organized into roles, which are subsequently assigned to authenticated principals or members (Google account, service account, Google group, authenticated users, cloud identity domain, etc.).

Central to IAM’s functioning is the allow policy, or IAM policy, which serves as the mechanism for specifying and enforcing the assignment of roles to principals. Each allow policy is linked to a specific resource. When an authenticated principal attempts to access...