Towards Building a Forensics Aware Language for Secure Logging

Shams Zawoad1, Marjan Mernik2 and Ragib Hasan1

  1. University of Alabama at Birmingham
    Birmingham, AL-354209, USA
    {zawoad,ragib}@cis.uab.edu
  2. University of Maribor
    Maribor, Slovenia
    marjan.mernik@uni-mb.si

Abstract

Trustworthy system logs and application logs are crucial for digital forensics. Researchers have proposed different security mechanisms to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of logs. However, applying current secure logging schemes on heterogeneous formats of logs is tedious. Here, we propose Forensics Aware Language (FAL), a domain-specific language (DSL) through which we can apply a secure logging mechanism on any format of logs. Using FAL, we can define log structure, which represents the format of logs and ensures the security properties of a chosen secure logging scheme. This log structure can later be used by FAL to serve two purposes: it can be used to store system logs securely and it will help application developers for secure application logging by generating the required source code.

Key words

DSL, Secure Logging, Audit Trail, Digital Forensics

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS131201051Z

Publication information

Volume 11, Issue 4 (October 2014)
Special Issue on Advances in Systems, Modeling, Languages and Agents
Year of Publication: 2014
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Zawoad, S., Mernik, M., Hasan, R.: Towards Building a Forensics Aware Language for Secure Logging. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1291–1314. (2014), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS131201051Z