Advances in network technology have enabled high-speed data transmission, and a ‘Cloud Storage’ has emerged that allows uploaded files to be viewed or downloaded regardless of the device and can expand the limited storage capacity in the device. U...
Advances in network technology have enabled high-speed data transmission, and a ‘Cloud Storage’ has emerged that allows uploaded files to be viewed or downloaded regardless of the device and can expand the limited storage capacity in the device. Users of PCs and mobile devices can use this to upload files stored in the device to cloud storage or periodically synchronize and back up files. Google’s personal cloud storage stores and manages various data related to uploaded files, such as file creation, modification and access timestamps, and file operations history. Cloud storage can complement this situation when ‘Anti-forensics’ measures such as file encryption, data wiping, disk formatting, and initialization have made it difficult to acquire digital evidence for PCs and mobile devices. In this study, first, I conducted an experiment to verify and acquire data created and changed in the process of ‘Upload – Save - File Target Operations - Download’ of Google’s personal cloud storage services: ‘Google Drive’ and ‘Google Photos’. As a result of the experiment, the following contents were verified in each Google’s cloud storage: ‘Possibility of intentional or unintentional file upload by automatic synchronization and backup functions’, ‘Maintaining modification timestamp of the file system when uploading files’, ‘Changing photo and video files due to image quality conversion upload’ and ‘Changing timestamps and adding file operations history according to operations on files stored in Google’s cloud storage’. To obtain all kinds of data that can be viewed or downloaded within each Google cloud storage, Google's data download service, "Google Takeout", and web browsers, have been confirmed to be available through download and screen capture methods. In addition, the available data types of each download method were compared with each other, and a procedure for obtaining all data types was proposed. Lastly, I reviewed the following legal issues that may arise using proposed acquisition methods: ‘Issues of Criminal jurisdiction due to extra-territorial search and seizure’, ‘Legality of downloading all files stored on cloud storage to PCs in search locations’, ‘Relevance of file operations history’, ‘Acceptability of file operations history as circumstantial evidence’, and ‘Admissibility of evidence for photo and video files with converted quality’. It is expected that the proposed acquisition method will reduce unnecessary work during the extra-territorial search and seizure of Google’s cloud storage, enabling rapid and accurate digital evidence acquisition without duplicate data.