Cloud encryption vs. forensics analysis: a 2019-2024 review of cloud data recovery challenges, zero-knowledge protocols, and legal trade-offs

The clash between cloud computing, cloud security, legal warrants, and digital forensics analysis had been developed as a result of the unsurpassed acceptance of cloud computing on the basis of strong encryption technologies in ensuring data security and compliance. This review presents the cloud encryption information and its forensic connotations in the peer-reviewed articles published in the period of time between 2019 and 2024. Poor physical access, sparse and transient data, multi-tenancy and sub-optimal logging exacerbated by encryption are long-standing forensic challenges. Although encryption is necessary in the achievement of confidentiality, it is a key access control mechanism that excludes the opportunity to access the data without the encryption keys, thus making poor key management a critical control point to the infrastructure. The review takes into account the new technologies, such as Zero Knowledge Protocols (ZKP), in which the implication of forensic technology, including the dusting of evidence due to the new procedures of evidencing, and the new privacy issues, which ZKPs claim to solve, become antithetical. The clashing tapestry of legal and ethical models about proliferation and fragmentation of competing regulations (GDPR) and data sovereignty and jurisdiction scandals (US CLOUD Act), cross-border enforcement, and the lawful access, hence, encryption dilemma and strong-arm legalism ethics come last. Ambiguous and conflicting findings between privacy and investigation were growing in light of a lack of fragmentation with regard to cross-border enforcement of ZKPs, dwindling borderless cloud infrastructure, and the growing legal conflict around encryption. We come to the conclusion part of our research were we find out the only solutions are intensive technological innovation, standardized legal regulations, and joint participation of all stakeholders to strike a balance among security, privacy and justice in cloud ecosystem.