B-CoC: A Blockchain-based Chain of Custody for Evidences Management in Digital Forensics

TL;DR

This paper introduces B-CoC, a blockchain-based system designed to securely manage the chain of custody for digital evidence, ensuring integrity and traceability throughout the investigation process.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel blockchain solution for digital evidence management, replacing manual processes with an auditable, tamper-proof system based on Ethereum.

Findings

B-CoC guarantees evidence integrity and traceability.

Prototype demonstrates feasible performance on Ethereum.

Enhances legal admissibility of digital evidence.

Abstract

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.