The Volatility Doctrine: Forensic Acquisition and Admissibility of Ephemeral Evidence in Cloud-Native Architectures

1. Introduction: The Disappearing Crime Scene

Traditional digital forensics, predicated on analyzing persistent disk images, is obsolete. The shift to microservices, serverless functions, and container orchestration means evidence is transient. The Volatility Doctrine addresses this by providing a framework for capturing the state of a live, ephemeral system in a manner that is both technically comprehensive and legally defensible.

2. The Mechanics of Ephemeral Acquisition

The methodology employs a multi-faceted approach to capture evidence without altering its state.

2.1. Tactic 1: Live Container Checkpointing

Using kernel-level technologies like CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace), this tactic captures the complete state of a running container—including all processes, open files, and network connections—and saves it to persistent image files for offline analysis.

2.2. Tactic 2: Sidecar Forensic Injection

In managed Kubernetes, a trusted forensic "sidecar" container is deployed into the same pod as the target, allowing it to perform live memory acquisition and process analysis on its sibling without contaminating the host.

2.3. Tactic 3: eBPF-based Event Streaming

eBPF-based event streaming enables real-time monitoring and acquisition of ephemeral events at the kernel level, providing forensic visibility into transient system activity without persistent traces.

3. Conclusion: The New Standard of Evidence

The proliferation of ephemeral architectures has rendered traditional forensic methodologies insufficient. The Volatility Doctrine recognizes that the most crucial evidence of a modern security breach is written in RAM, not on disk. Mastering the acquisition of this volatile data is the new, mandatory standard for establishing ground truth and achieving forensic certainty.