Proactive Forensics in IoT: Privacy-Aware Log-Preservation Architecture in Fog-Enabled-Cloud Using Holochain and Containerization Technologies

Collecting and preserving the smart environment logs connected to cloud storage is challenging due to the black-box nature and the multi-tenant cloud models which can pervade log secrecy and privacy. The existing work for log secrecy and confidentiality depends on cloud-assisted models, but these models are prone to multi-stakeholder collusion problems. This study proposes 'PLAF,' a holistic and automated architecture for proactive forensics in the Internet of Things (IoT) that considers the security and privacy-aware distributed edge node log preservation by tackling the multi-stakeholder issue in a fog enabled cloud. We have developed a test-bed to implement the specification, as mentioned earlier, by incorporating many state-of-the-art technologies in one place. We used Holochain to preserve log integrity, provenance, log verifiability, trust admissibility, and ownership non-repudiation. We introduced the privacy preservation automation of log probing via non-malicious command and control botnets in the container environment. For continuous and robust integration of IoT microservices, we used docker containerization technology. For secure storage and session establishment for logs validation, Paillier Homomorphic Encryption, and SSL with Curve25519 is used respectively. We performed the security and performance analysis of the proposed PLAF architecture and showed that, in stress conditions, the automatic log harvesting running in containers gives a 95% confidence interval. Moreover, we show that log preservation via Holochain can be performed on ARM-Based architectures such as Raspberry Pi in a very less amount of time when compared with RSA and blockchain.