Cloud computing technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous and indispensable. However, its widespread adoption also exposes organizations and individuals to a broad spectrum of potential threats. Despite the multiple advantages the cloud offers, organizations remain cautious about migrating their data and applications to the cloud due to fears of data breaches and security compromises. In light of these concerns, this study has conducted an in-depth examination of a variety of articles to enhance the comprehension of the challenges related to safeguarding and fortifying data within the cloud environment. Furthermore, the research has scrutinized several well-documented data breaches, analyzing the financial consequences they inflicted. Additionally, it scrutinizes the distinctions between conventional digital forensics and the forensic procedures specific to cloud computing. As a result of this investigation, the study has concluded by proposing potential opportunities for further research in this critical domain. By doing so, it contributes to our collective understanding of the complex panorama of cloud data protection and security, while acknowledging the evolving nature of technology and the need for ongoing exploration and innovation in this field. This study also helps in understanding the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of cloud digital forensics, which is found to be quite high at ≈16.53% from 2023 to 2031. Moreover, its market is expected to reach ≈USD 36.9 billion by the year 2031; presently, it is ≈USD 11.21 billion, which shows that there are great opportunities for investment in this area. This study also strategically addresses emerging challenges in cloud digital forensics, providing a comprehensive approach to navigating and overcoming the complexities associated with the evolving landscape of cloud computing.

This paper describes our design of a contents distribution framework that supports transparent distribution of digital contents on the Internet as well as copyright protection of participants in the contents distribution value chain. Copyright protection must ensure that participants in the distribution channel get the royalties due to them and that purchasers use the contents according to usage rules. It must also prevent illegal draining of digital contents. To design a contents distribution framework satisfying the above requirements, we first present four digital contents distribution models. On the basis of the suggested distribution models, we designed a contract system for distribution of royalties among participants in the contents distribution channel, a license mechanism for enforcement of contents usage to purchasers, and both a packaging mechanism and a secure client system for prevention of illegal draining of digital contents.

As blockchain-based applications and research such as cryptocurrency increase, an oracle problem to bring external data in the blockchain is emerging. Among the methods to solve the oracle problem, a method of configuring oracle based on TLS, an existing internet infrastructure, has been proposed. However, these methods currently have the disadvantage of not supporting privacy protection for external data, and there are limitations in configuring the process of a smart contract based on external data verification for automation. To solve this problem, we propose a framework consisting of middleware of external source server, data prover, and verification contract. The framework converts the data signed in the web server into a proof that the owner can prove with zk-SNARKs and provides a smart contract that can verify this. Through these procedures, data owners not only protect their privacy by proving themselves, but they can also automate on-chain processing through smart contract verification. For the proposed framework, we create a proof using libsnark for server data and show the performance and cost to verify with Solidity the smart contract language of the Ethereum platform.

The conventional electric power system is a unidirectional configuration that delivers electricity to the consumer in the power plant, but as the prosumers emerges, microgrid technology that enables bi-directional configuration has been developed. By applying the data distribution processing technology called the blockchain to the microgrid, time and cost can be saved compared with the conventional microgrid system. Through the related research, we analyze the structure of the microgrid and the utilization of the blockchain, study the pros and cons of applying the public blockchain and the private (consortium) blockchain, and propose the possible scenarios.

In order to conceal malware, malware authors use the packing and encryption techniques. If the malware is packed or encrypted, then it is very difficult to analyze. Therefore, to prevent the harmful effects of malware and to generate signatures for malware detection, the packed and encrypted executable codes must initially be unpacked. The first step of unpacking is to detect the packed executable files. In this paper, a packed file detection technique (PHAD) based on a PE header analysis is proposed. In many cases, to pack and unpack the executable codes, PE files have unusual attributes in their PE headers. In this paper, these characteristics are utilized to detect the packed files. a characteristic vector (CV) that consists of eight elements is defined, and the Euclidean distance (ED) of the CV is calculated. The EDs of the packed files are calculated and represent the base threshold for the detection of packed files.