Ontology-driven perspective of CFRaaS

A Cloud Forensic Readiness as a Service (CFRaaS) model allows an environmentto preemptively accumulate relevant potential digital evidence (PDE) which maybe needed during a post-event response process. The benefit of applying a CFRaaSmodel in a cloud environment, is that, it is designed to prevent the modification/tampering of the cloud architectures or the infrastructure during the reactive pro-cess, which if it could, may end up having far-reaching implications. The authorsof this article present the reactive processasaverycostlyexercisewhentheinfra-structure must be reprogrammed every time the process is conducted. This mayhamper successful investigation from the forensic experts and law enforcementagencies perspectives. The CFRaaS model, in its current state, has not been pres-ented in a way that can help to classify or visualize the different types of potentialevidence in all the cloud deployable models, and this may limit the expectationsof what or how the required PDE may be collected. To address this problem, thearticle presents the CFRaaS from a holistic ontology-driven perspective, whichallows the forensic experts to be able to apply the CFRaaS based on its simplicityof the concepts, relationship or semantics between different form of potential evi-dence, as well as how the security of a digital environment being investigatedcould be upheld. The CFRaaS in this context follows a fundamental ontologyengineering approach that is based on the classical Resource Description Frame-work. The proposed ontology-driven approach to CFRaaS is, therefore, aknowledge-base that uses layer-dependencies, which could be an essential toolkitfor digital forensic examiners and other stakeholders in cloud-security. The imple-mentation of this approach could further provide a platform to develop otherknowledge base components for cloud forensics and securit