Retrieving and Identifying Remnants of Artefacts on Local Devices Using Sync.com Cloud

Most current research in cloud forensics is focused on tackling the challenges encountered by forensic investigators in identifying and recovering artifacts from cloud devices. These challenges arise from the diverse array of cloud service providers as each has its distinct rules, guidelines, and requirements. This research proposes an investigation technique for identifying and locating data remnants in two main stages: artefact collection and evidence identification. In the artefacts collection stage, the proposed technique determines the location of the artefacts in cloud storage and collects them for further investigation in the next stage. In the evidence identification stage, the collected artefacts are investigated to identify the evidence relevant to the cybercrime currently being investigated. These two stages perform an integrated process for mitigating the difficulty of locating the artefacts and reducing the time of identifying the relevant evidence. The proposed technique is implemented and tested by applying a forensics investigation algorithm on Sync.com cloud storage using the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system.