Digital Forensics: Virtual Machine and Cloud Forensics

FACT Digital Forensics paper drill on virtual machine and cloud forensics, covering hypervisor types under the Type 1 bare-metal model with VMware ESXi, Xen, Hyper-V, and KVM, the Type 2 hosted model with VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, and Parallels, virtual disk formats including VMDK on VMware, VHD and VHDX on Microsoft Hyper-V, QCOW2 on QEMU and KVM, and VDI on VirtualBox, thin and thick provisioning, VM snapshot artefacts such as .vmsn, .vmem, delta .vmdk, and .vmss suspended-state files, the .vmx configuration file and .nvram BIOS variables, live versus cold acquisition, forensic mounting of virtual disks using FTK Imager, vmware-mount, and qemu-nbd, the VM escape attack class, and the cloud forensics framework drawn from NIST SP 800-145 service and deployment models, NIST IR 8006 forensic challenges, NIST SP 800-86 procedural guidance, the US CLOUD Act 2018, and the Indian Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, with provider-specific evidence sources including AWS CloudTrail and VPC flow logs, Azure Activity Log, Google Cloud Audit Logs, S3 object versioning, and ephemerality concerns in managed containers and serverless functions on Lambda, Azure Functions, and Cloud Functions.

For FACT aspirants and MSc digital forensics students working through virtualisation and cloud modules, and useful as a revision pass before NFSU MSc, GCFA, CCSK, CHFI, and CCSP exams. Questions emphasise definitions, vendor mapping, evidence-source identification, and the Indian and US legal framework for cross-border cloud investigations.

Topics covered:

• Hypervisor types and disk formats: ESXi, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, KVM, VMDK, VHDX, QCOW2, VDI
• VM snapshot, memory, and configuration artefacts: .vmsn, .vmem, .vmss, .vmx, .nvram
• Live versus cold acquisition and forensic mounting with FTK Imager and qemu-nbd
• NIST SP 800-145 cloud service and deployment models
• NIST IR 8006 multi-tenancy and ephemerality challenges
• CLOUD Act 2018 and IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2021
• AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud evidence sources
• Container and serverless forensic limitations

Useful for revision and self-testing before the FACT Digital Forensics paper.

Allow 30 minutes.