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 storage logs

Like AWS’s S3 buckets, GCP Storage also refers to storage containers as buckets. Each bucket can contain any file format, referred to as an object. Principals can be assigned granular permissions and access to each bucket or object. Storage buckets can also be made publicly accessible on the internet, depending on the use case. Storage metadata is recorded in the key/value pair format at the bucket level to manage the object life cycle. Values assigned to keys can be a bucket name string or an array of object life cycle management configurations.

Once a storage bucket is created, you cannot change the bucket name, the location (where the bucket is hosted), the project associated with the storage bucket, or the metadata generation number, uniquely identifying the bucket state.

Storage permissions

Similar to IAM permissions, specific permissions are required for accessing objects by a resource or a principal. In GCP’s IAM realm, permissions are...