Blockchain-Based Evidence Chain of Custody in Digital Forensics

Abstract

Tracing and integrity of digital evidence are essential demands of the digital forensic investigations in the modern world. The traditional chain of custody systems are based on central databases and manual record keeping which is prone to manipulation, intrusion, and data destruction. This is experimental research aimed at introducing a blockchain-based system to ensure the safe management of the digital evidence of custody. The system uses a permissioned blockchain and smart contracts to automate registration of evidence, change of custody and generation of audit trails. Fingerprints of digital evidence are generated by cryptographic hash functions and are therefore immutable and verifiably so. The testbed of a private blockchain was introduced and tested in a controlled laboratory setup. The data on the metrics of the performance including the latency of the transactions, throughput and storage overhead were measured. It has been shown that the suggested solution contributes to evidence integrity, transparency, and accountability significantly without affecting the performance of the system, which proves that blockchain-based solutions can be used to ensure secure management of the evidence.