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

Policy Analyzer

Given that IAM assignments occur over roles where principals are assigned access permissions to a resource using roles, GCP offers additional tools for troubleshooting and investigating IAM policy configurations. Policy Analyzer allows DFIR teams to analyze excess privileges assigned to users or roles that may have resulted in abuse. Policy Analyzer can also determine whether a user has the necessary permissions to perform specific actions, such as deleting a table, a GCE resource, and so on.

The following is an example of Policy Analyzer’s output. We can see in the query result what roles and permissions were configured for a user under a GCP resource. Note that resources are allocated toward a project, and GCP tags them as resources:

Figure 6.2 – Policy Analyzer query results and list of permissions per role

Figure 6.2 – Policy Analyzer query results and list of permissions per role

DFIR use cases for Policy Analyzer

Using a policy analyzer in the context of DFIR within GCP enables organizations...