Master cloud artifact analysis. In this scenario, you will apply real-world forensic reasoning to identify the appropriate AWS logging mechanism required to trace unauthorized object-level access within a cloud storage environment.
During a data exfiltration investigation, your digital forensics team is tasked with analyzing an incident involving an enterprise Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Confidential proprietary blueprints stored in an S3 bucket named corp-engineering-blueprints-prod were leaked to a competitor.
The investigators need to determine the exact IP address, timestamp, and IAM role associated with the specific GetObject request for the file project-titan-schematics.pdf. A review of the default CloudTrail configuration reveals only management events (e.g., bucket creation, policy changes) but no object-level read/write tracking.
Initial remote acquisition and cloud environment triage yielded the following administrative state:
The evidence indicates that the default AWS CloudTrail is enabled, but it is only capturing bucket-level management events. Crucially, the bucket properties show that an alternative logging mechanism—Server Access Logging—has been explicitly enabled, outputting data to a secondary bucket (corp-s3-access-logs).
Collection and Analysis. The investigator is identifying the correct remote artifact repository to collect logs for parsing, filtering, and timeline reconstruction of the data exfiltration event.
D. Amazon S3 Server Access Logging is the correct answer. Server Access Logging provides detailed records for the requests that are made to a bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request, such as the requester, bucket name, request time, request action (e.g., GET, PUT), response status, and error code. This is the primary artifact for proving object-level access when CloudTrail Data Events are disabled.
AWS CloudTrail (A): By default, CloudTrail only logs bucket-level management events (like `CreateBucket` or `PutBucketPolicy`). While it can log object-level API calls, this requires explicitly enabling "Data Events" (which the evidence shows is disabled in this scenario).
Amazon CloudWatch (B): CloudWatch is primarily used for performance monitoring, operational metrics, and alarming. It does not natively provide detailed, row-by-row API access logs identifying specific users and objects.
AWS Config (C): AWS Config records configuration changes to AWS resources (e.g., a bucket policy changing). It does not track data plane events like a user downloading a file.
The investigator will preserve the logs stored in the corp-s3-access-logs bucket. Because these logs are raw, space-delimited text files, the analyst will ingest them into a log analysis tool (like Splunk, ELK, or AWS Athena) and query for HTTP 200 OK responses associated with the GET Object API call targeting the URI for project-titan-schematics.pdf.
In cloud forensics, do not assume ubiquitous logging. Administrators frequently disable deep logging (like CloudTrail Data Events) to save on ingestion costs. Recognizing the difference between Control Plane logging (Bucket creation) and Data Plane logging (Object downloads) is critical. Server Access Logs are a vital, legacy artifact for reconstructing S3 data breaches.
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