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The State of the Art Forensic Techniques in Mobile Cloud Environment: A Survey, Challenges and Current Trends

Smartphones have become popular in recent days due to the accessibility of a wide range of applications. These sophisticated applications demand more computing resources in a resource constraint smartphone. Cloud computing is the motivating factor for the progress of these applications. The emerging mobile cloud computing introduces a new architecture to offload smartphone and utilize cloud computing technology to solve resource requirements. The popularity of mobile cloud computing is an opportunity for misuse and unlawful activities. Therefore, it is a challenging platform for digital forensic investigations due to the non-availability of methodologies, tools and techniques. The aim of this work is to analyze the forensic tools and methodologies for crime investigation in a mobile cloud platform as it poses challenges in proving the evidence. The advancement of forensic tools and methodologies are much slower than the current technology development in mobile cloud computing. Thus, forces the available tools, and techniques become increasingly obsolete. Therefore, it opens up the door for the new forensic tools and techniques to cope up with recent developments. Hence, this work presents a detailed survey of forensic methodology and corresponding issues in a mobile device, cloud environment, and mobile cloud applications. It mainly focuses on digital forensic issues related to mobile cloud applications and also analyze the scope, challenges and opportunities. Finally, this work reviewed the forensic procedures of two cloud storage services used for mobile cloud applications such as Dropbox and SkyDrive.