Optimising Digital Forensics Investigations in Containers as a Service Environments

Elie, Louise (2024) Optimising Digital Forensics Investigations in Containers as a Service Environments. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Cloud computing is a popular technology used among individuals and companies. One of its models, named Containers as a Services (CaaS), combines the dynamic nature of containers with the advantages of a managed and scalable infrastructure. This paper focuses on the performance of digital forensics in CaaS environments, where traditional forensic procedures must adapt to the challenges posed by the ephemeral nature of containers and the volatile data associated with public cloud environments. With a significant gap in the related work, this study contributes to the field by analysing container runtime events and metadata from Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool, to optimise forensics investigations in public cloud systems. This research proposes a containerised infrastructure hosted on Azure with the CaaS model named Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to conduct digital forensics. The proposed architecture exposed a vulnerable WordPress application deployed with AKS. To simulated real-world scenarios, brute force attacks using X Brute Forcer and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks using Apache JMeter were performed on an external Kali Linux machine. The results demonstrated that the data collected from containers runtime events and metadata confirmed evidence of the attacks. The forensic investigations were efficient as rules for threat detection were configurated, along with mitigation solutions.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Mahajan, Kamil UNSPECIFIED
Uncontrolled Keywords:	digital forensics; containers security; Kubernetes; public cloud
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Cloud computing Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cyber Security
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	17 Jul 2025 14:43
Last Modified:	17 Jul 2025 14:43
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/8171

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