A Comprehensive Survey of Blockchain Usage in Digital Evidence Handling

Authors

  • A. Y. V. Krishna National Forensic Sciences University, India.
  • Naveen Chaudhary National Forensic Sciences University, India.
  • Ajit Muzumdar National Forensic Sciences University, India.

Keywords:

Blockchain, Consensus mechanism, Smart contract, Chain of Custody, Digital evidence handling

Abstract

Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing security and trust in various domains, including digital evidence handling. The survey begins by providing an overview of blockchain technology, high- lighting its key components, such as implementation platforms, consensus mechanisms, types and smart contract. Through an analysis of existing re- search and real-world use cases, the survey showcases the potential benefits of blockchain in digital evidence handling. These benefits include increased trust and transparency, improved evidence integrity, efficient and auditable chain of custody processes, and enhanced stakeholder collaboration. How- ever, the survey also identifies several challenges and limitations of blockchain technology in this context. These challenges encompass scalability, privacy concerns, interoperability, legal and regulatory considerations, and standardized frameworks. Addressing these challenges is crucial for successfully adopting and implementing blockchain in digital evidence handling.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

S. Nair, J. L. de la Vara, M. Sabetzadeh, D. Falessi, Evidence manage- ment for compliance of critical systems with safety standards: A survey on the state of practice, Information and Software Technology 60 (2015) 1–15.

A. Muzumdar, C. Modi, M. G.M., C. Vyjayanthi, A trustworthy and incentivized smart grid energy trading framework using distributed ledger and smart contracts, Journal of Network and Computer Applications 183-184 (2021) 103074.

A. Muzumdar, C. Modi, C. Vyjayanthi, A permissioned blockchain enabled trustworthy and incentivized emission trading system, Journal of Cleaner Production 349 (2022) 131274.

F. C. Tsai, The application of blockchain of custody in criminal investigation process, Procedia Computer Science 192 (2021) 2779–2788. Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference KES2021.

H. Al-Khateeb, G. Epiphaniou, H. Daly, Blockchain for Modern Digital Forensics: The Chain-of-Custody as a Distributed Ledger, Springer International Publishing, pp. 149–168.

M. Chopade, S. Khan, U. Shaikh, R. Pawar, Digital forensics: Maintaining chain of custody using blockchain, in: 2019 Third International conference on I-SMAC (IoT in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) (I-SMAC), pp. 744–747.

P. C. Giannelli, Chain of custody and the handling of real evidence, Am. Crim. L. Rev. 20 (1982) 527–568.

M. M. Evans, P. A. Stagner, Maintaining the chain of custody evidence handling in forensic cases, AORN Journal 78 (2003) 563–569.

L. E. Cartier, S. H. Ali, M. S. Krzemnicki, Blockchain, chain of custody and trace elements: An overview of tracking and traceability opportunities in the gem industry., Journal of Gemmology 36 (2018).

A. Tanner, J. Bruno, Timely: A chain of custody data visualizer, in: 2019 SoutheastCon, pp. 1–5.

M. Stoyanova, Y. Nikoloudakis, S. Panagiotakis, E. Pallis, E. K. Markakis, A survey on the internet of things (iot) forensics: Chal- lenges, approaches, and open issues, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials 22 (2020) 1191–1221.

S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Decentralized business review (2008) 21260–21269.

M. Pustiˇsek, A. Kos, Approaches to front-end iot application development for the ethereum blockchain, Procedia Computer Science 129 (2018) 410–419.

Hyperledger, Hyperledger fabric, https://www.hyperledger.org/use/

fabric, 2017.

Corda, Corda master documentation, https://docs.corda.net/, 2016.

IOTA, The next generation of distributed ledger technology iota, https://www.iota.org/, 2015.

B. Group, Proof of stake versus proof of work, https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf, 2015.

POET, Sawtooth v1.1.2 documentation, https://sawtooth.hyper

ledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/architecture/poet.html, 2018.

P4Titan, Slimcoin: A peer-to-peer crypto-currency with proof-of-burn, http://www.slimcoin.club/whitepaper.pdf, 2019.

PoSV, Proof of stake velocity: Building the social currency of the digital age - reddcoin, https://reddcoin.com/proof-of-stake-velocity/, 2016.

S. Angelis, Pbft vs proof of authority and applying the cap theorem to permissioned blockchain, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2058/paper-06.pdf, 2016.

PoC, Proof of capacity, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/

p/proof- capacity-cryptocurrency.asp, 2010.

NEM, Nem technical reference, https://nemplatform.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/NEM techRef.pdf, 2015.

A. Bentov, Rosenfeld, Proof of activity: Extending bitcoin’s proof of work via proof of stake, SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev. 42 (2014) 34–37.

G. W. E. A. Zulfany Rasjid, Benfano Soewito, A review of collisions in cryptographic hash function used in digital forensic tools, Procedia Computer Science 116 (2017) 381–392.

J. C´osi´c, M. Baˇca, (im)proving chain of custody and digital evidence integrity with time stamp, in: The 33rd International Convention MIPRO, pp. 1226–1230.

S. Saleem, O. Popov, R. Dahman, Evaluation of security methods for ensuring the integrity of digital evidence, in: 2011 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology, pp. 220–225.

K. Widatama, Y. Prayudi, B. Sugiantoro, Application of rc4 cryptography method to support xml security on digital chain of custody data storage, International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics 7 (2018) 230–238.

A. H. Lone, R. N. Mir, Forensic-chain: Blockchain based digital forensics chain of custody with poc in hyperledger composer, Digital Investigation 28 (2019) 44–55.

L. Ahmad, S. Khanji, F. Iqbal, F. Kamoun, Blockchain based chain of custody towards real time tamper-proof evidence management, in: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES ’20.

M. Ali, A. Ismail, H. Elgohary, S. Darwish, S. Mesbah, A procedure for tracing chain of custody in digital image forensics: A paradigm based on grey hash and blockchain, Symmetry 14 (2022).

Z. Tian, M. Li, M. Qiu, Y. Sun, S. Su, Block-def: A secure digital evidence framework using blockchain, Information Sciences 491 (2019) 151–165.

A. A. Khan, M. Uddin, A. A. Shaikh, A. A. Laghari, A. E. Rajput, Mf-ledger: Blockchain hyperledger sawtooth-enabled novel and secure multimedia chain of custody forensic investigation architecture, IEEE Access 9 (2021) 103637–103650.

S. Bonomi, M. Casini, C. Ciccotelli, B-coc: A blockchain-based chain of custody for evidences management in digital forensics, arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.10359 (2018).

M. Li, C. Lal, M. Conti, D. Hu, Lechain: A blockchain-based lawful evidence management scheme for digital forensics, Future Generation Computer Systems 115 (2021) 406–420.

L. Zarpala, F. Casino, A blockchain-based forensic model for financial crime investigation: the embezzlement scenario, Digital Finance 3 (2021) 301–332.

B. C. Aparecido Petroni, R. F. Gon¸calves, P. S´ergio de Arruda Ign´acio, J. Z. Reis, G. J. Dolce Uzum Martins, Smart contracts applied to a functional architecture for storage and maintenance of digital chain of custody using blockchain, Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation 34 (2020) 300985.

Y. Zhang, S. Wu, B. Jin, J. Du, A blockchain-based process provenance for cloud forensics, in: 2017 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer and Communications (ICCC), pp. 2470–2473.

X. Burri, E. Casey, T. Boll´e, D.-O. Jaquet-Chiffelle, Chronological independently verifiable electronic chain of custody ledger using blockchain technology, Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation 33 (2020) 300976.

H. M. Elgohary, S. M. Darwish, S. M. Elkaffas, Improving uncertainty in chain of custody for image forensics investigation applications, IEEE Access 10 (2022) 14669–14679.

E. Yunianto, Y. Prayudi, B. Sugiantoro, B-dec: Digital evidence cabinet based on blockchain for evidence management, Int. J. Comput. Appl 181 (2019) 22–29.

F. F. Alruwaili, Custodyblock: A distributed chain of custody evidence framework, Information 12 (2021) 88.

M. Hossain, Y. Karim, R. Hasan, Fif-iot: A forensic investigation frame- work for iot using a public digital ledger, in: 2018 IEEE International Congress on Internet of Things (ICIOT), pp. 33–40.

G. Kumar, R. Saha, C. Lal, M. Conti, Internet-of-forensic (iof): A blockchain based digital forensics framework for iot applications, Future Generation Computer Systems 120 (2021) 13–25.

S. Li, T. Qin, G. Min, Blockchain based digital forensics investigation framework in the internet of things and social systems, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 6 (2019) 1433–1441.

A. Singh, R. A. Ikuesan, H. Venter, Secure storage model for digital forensic readiness, IEEE Access 10 (2022) 19469–19480.

M. Cebe, E. Erdin, K. Akkaya, H. Aksu, S. Uluagac, Block4forensic: An integrated lightweight blockchain framework for forensics applications of connected vehicles, IEEE Communications Magazine 56 (2018) 50–57.

D. A. Flores, A. Jhumka, Implementing chain of custody requirements in database audit records for forensic purposes, in: 2017 IEEE Trust- com/BigDataSE/ICESS, pp. 675–682.

Downloads

Published

24.03.2024

How to Cite

Krishna, A. Y. V. ., Chaudhary, N. ., & Muzumdar, A. . (2024). A Comprehensive Survey of Blockchain Usage in Digital Evidence Handling. International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications in Engineering, 12(18s), 820–830. Retrieved from https://ijisae.org/index.php/IJISAE/article/view/5171

Issue

Section

Research Article