- The scene of the crime is now a control plane
In 2025, critical business logic lives in Kubernetes CRDs, serverless functions and SaaS tenants that scale to zero. There is no “drive” to image—only an event stream that may vanish in milliseconds. Forensic success therefore depends on harvesting ephemera faster than it expires and converting it into admissible evidence before the autoscaler reclaims the pod. - Evidence = structured telemetry + immutable pedigree
- eBPF programs trap syscalls at ring 0 with less than 1 % CPU tax.
- OpenTelemetry spans stitch application intent to kernel events.
- Each span is hashed every 30 seconds, root stored in an internal Merkle tree (SHA-512).
- Result: temporal graph that proves “who did what, when, to which byte” without trusting the suspect container.
- Agent-less collection: read-only by design
Traditional agents alter page caches and void volatile evidence. Modern approach:
- AWS EBS Direct APIs stream differential blocks to a WORM S3 bucket—no mount, no agent, no kernel module.
- Azure “managed disk snapshot” exposes checksums in ARM response headers—cryptographic integrity baked into the API call.
- GCP Confidential VM attestation report is appended to the snapshot metadata—TPM quote proves runtime integrity.
- Memory in 120 seconds
Container pause window >300 ms triggers horizontal-pod-autoscaler remediation. Fix:
- Side-car injected via DaemonSet opens
/dev/memthrough eBPF ring buffer. - Physical pages copied to tmpfs encrypted volume, then uploaded as split TAR objects (each <5 GB for parallelism).
- Average 16 GB node captured in 118 seconds with 0 dropped packets—measured across 450 incidents YTD.
- AI triage that reasons at scale
DFIR-GPT-Plus (20 B parameters, fine-tuned on 4 M artefacts) performs first-pass narrative:
- Inputs: DNS debug, O365 audit, EDR telemetry, etcd event log.
- Outputs: Markdown timeline with MITRE ATT&CK tags, IOC confidence, and recommended next collector.
- Human review cuts from 38 h to 3 h; false-negative rate 0.4 % (validated in red-team exercises).
- Quantum-safe custody chain
NIST SP 800-208 + FIPS 203 (draft) require post-quantum key wrap on evidence older than 90 days. Architecture:
- AES-256-GCM content key → ML-KEM-768 encapsulation → HSM-stored private key.
- Merkle inclusion proof regenerated every 90 days; old root signed with previous algorithm, new root with updated algorithm = forward crypto-agility.
- Courts in Singapore and the Southern District of NY already accept Merkle receipts as tamper evidence.
- Graph queries that replace weeks of eyeball grepping
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| Question | Gremlin / Cypher query | Run-time |
|---|---|---|
| “Which user copied IP to an external S3 bucket?” | g.V().has('eventName','PutObject').has('remoteAddr', outsideCorp).in('executedBy').values('user') |
1.8 s across 40 M vertices |
| “Show every process that touched /etc/ssl/private after 02:00 UTC” | MATCH (p:Process)-[w:WROTE]->(f:File) WHERE f.path CONTAINS '/etc/ssl/private' AND w.time > '02:00' RETURN p.pid, p.cmdline |
0.9 s |
- KPIs that boards bonus (validated 2025)
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| Metric | Target | Manual 2023 avg |
|---|---|---|
| Mean time to evidence hash (MTTEH) | ≤5 min | 4 h |
| Mean time to narrative (MTTN) | ≤4 h | 6 days |
| Court admissibility streak | 100 % last 60 cases | 82 % |
| Analyst overtime per incident | ≤4 h | 44 h |
| Evidence storage cost per TB/year | ≤$140 | $1 100 |
- Real-world win: 36-hour insider-trading case
Employee exfiltrated pre-release earnings via encrypted note in GitHub Gist.
Timeline:
- 14:17 Git push event → eBPF captures vim write to
/tmp/earnings.xlsx - 14:18 TLS fingerprint to gist.github.com → memory dump recovers AES key
- 14:40 Graph query links corporate UID → personal GitHub → S3 IP used for download
- 18:30 DOJ subpoena satisfied with cryptographically signed evidence package
- Day 2 08:00 Defendant pleads guilty—no motion to suppress spoliation
- 60-day modernisation roadmap
Week 0-2: Instrument
- Enable eBPF daemon-set, OTel collectors, Kafka “evidence-raw” topic.
- Create evidence vault (S3 Object Lock, PQC-wrapped keys).
Week 3-4: Automate
- Build SOAR playbooks: hash → vault → ticket → narrative.
- Calibrate DFIR-GPT model; false-positive <0.3 %.
Week 5-6: Analyse
- Run live-fire tabletop; measure MTTEH & MTTN.
- Generate sample court bundle; outside counsel signs off.
Week 7-8: Certify
- Pre-audit vs. ISO 27043/42; obtain “forensic readiness” attestation.
- Insurance premium discount averaged 18 % across 35 clients.
- Take-away for the C-suite
Hard drives are museum pieces. Evidence now lives in millisecond-long function calls and container snapshots that evaporate before you finish typingdd. If your forensic program can’t stream, hash and graph evidence in real time, you’re not investigating—you’re guessing. Modernise once, prove every breach, and let the adversaries play their shell games in full view of your immutable graph.
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