A new report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology catalogs how use of the cloud hampers the ability of law enforcement and auditors to conduct investigations and notes how providers of the technology benefit from a lack of standard operating procedures.
“Unlike a traditional computing environment to which the forensic examiner might have access to perform experiments, in the cloud, the details of what logs are produced, what other records are produced and/or kept, and where they might be found are opaque except through the testimony of representatives of the Provider,” the report reads. “In many cases, these individuals are custodians of the records but do not have detailed knowledge of technologies or actual records that might be found if sought after. Indeed, companies benefit from not keeping such records or having custodians with only limited knowledge.”
The report released this week was produced under the agency’s remit from the federal chief information officer to help advance the adoption of secure cloud technology by working with industry to develop standards and guidelines for their operation. Interoperability and compliance auditing have been identified as priority areas in NIST gap analyses of cloud computing standards dating back to 2011.
“If cloud providers were to keep better records that might be sought after as evidence and had more knowledgeable custodians, they might be on the hook for finding and processing the extra records that are found,” Martin Herman, senior adviser for forensics and information technology at NIST and an author of the report, told Nextgov. “This would require that the provider use more resources, not only in pers ..
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