B-CoC: A Blockchain-based Chain of Custody for Evidences Management in Digital Forensics
This addresses the issue of evidence tampering in digital forensics for legal investigations, offering an automated solution to replace manual processes.
The paper tackles the problem of managing digital evidence integrity in forensics by proposing B-CoC, a blockchain-based system that dematerializes the chain of custody, and it shows performance evaluation results from an Ethereum prototype.
One of the main issues in digital forensics is the management of evidences. From the time of evidence collection until the time of their exploitation in a legal court, evidences may be accessed by multiple parties involved in the investigation that take temporary their ownership. This process, called Chain of Custody (CoC), must ensure that evidences are not altered during the investigation, despite multiple entities owned them, in order to be admissible in a legal court. Currently digital evidences CoC is managed entirely manually with entities involved in the chain required to fill in documents accompanying the evidence. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based Chain of Custody (B-CoC) to dematerialize the CoC process guaranteeing auditable integrity of the collected evidences and traceability of owners. We developed a prototype of B-CoC based on Ethereum and we evaluated its performance.