Integrity verification of VM data collected in private cloud environment and reliability verification of related forensic tools

Recently, a large number of corporations are adopting cloud solution in order to reduce IT-related costs. By the way, Digital Trace should have admissibility to be accepted as digital evidence in court, and integrity is one of the factors for admissibility. In this context, this research implemented integrity verification test to VM Data which was collected by well-known private cloud solutions such as Citrix, VMware, and MS Hyper-V. This paper suggests the effective way to verify integrity of VM data collected in private cloud computing environment based on the experiment and introduces the error that EnCase fails to mount VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) files properly.