A Cloud Forensic Readiness Model Using a Botnet as a Service

Cloud forensics has become an inexorable and a transformative discipline in the modern world. The need to share a pool of resources and to extract digital evidence from the same distributed resources to be presented in a court of law, has become a subject of focus. Forensic readiness is a pro-active process that entails digital preparedness that an organisation uses to gather, store and handle incident responsive data with the aim of reducing post-event response by digital forensics investigators. Forensic readiness in the cloud can be achieved by implementing a botnet with nonmalicious code as opposed to malicious code. The botnet still infects instances of virtual computers within the cloud, however, with good intentions as opposed to bad intentions. The botnet is, effectively, implemented as a service that harvests digital information that can be preserved as admissible and submissive potential digital evidence. In this paper, the authors‟ problem is that there are no techniques that exist for gathering information in the cloud for digital forensic readiness purposes as described in international standard for digital forensic investigations (ISO/IEC 27043). The authors proposed a model that allows digital forensic readiness to be achieved by implementing a Botnet as a service (BaaS) in a cloud environment.