Forensic Analysis of G Suite Collaborative Protocols

Widespread adoption of cloud services is fundamentally changing the way IT services are delivered and how data is stored. Current forensic tools and techniques have been slow to adapt to new challenges and demands of collecting and analyzing cloud artifacts. Traditional methods focusing only on client data collection are incomplete, as the client may have only a (partial) snapshot and misses cloud-native artifacts that may contain valuable historical information. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of recovering and analyzing cloud-native artifacts using G Suite as a case study. We develop a tool that extracts and processes the history of Google Documents and Google Slides by reverse engineering the web applications private protocol. Combined with previous work that has focused on API-based acquisition of cloud drives, this presents a more complete solution to cloud forensics, and is generalizable to any cloud service that maintains a detailed log of revisions