Secure Cross-Chain Provenance for Digital Forensics Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces ForensiCross, a novel cross-chain framework designed to enable secure, reliable, and efficient collaboration across multiple blockchain systems for digital forensics and provenance tracking.

Contribution

It presents the first dedicated cross-chain solution for digital forensics, including a communication protocol, provenance methods, and security analysis to improve multi-agency collaboration.

Findings

ForensiCross is secure and reliable for provenance extraction.

It outperforms existing methods in node efficiency.

Communication time increases slightly but remains acceptable.

Abstract

In digital forensics and various sectors like medicine and supply chain, blockchains play a crucial role in providing a secure and tamper-resistant system that meticulously records every detail, ensuring accountability. However, collaboration among different agencies, each with its own blockchains, creates challenges due to diverse protocols and a lack of interoperability, hindering seamless information sharing. Cross-chain technology has been introduced to address these challenges. Current research about blockchains in digital forensics, tends to focus on individual agencies, lacking a comprehensive approach to collaboration and the essential aspect of cross-chain functionality. This emphasizes the necessity for a framework capable of effectively addressing challenges in securely sharing case information, implementing access controls, and capturing provenance data across interconnected blockchains. Our solution, ForensiCross, is the first cross-chain solution specifically designed for digital forensics and provenance. It includes BridgeChain and features a unique communication protocol for cross-chain and multi-chain solutions. ForensiCross offers meticulous provenance capture and extraction methods, mathematical analysis to ensure reliability, scalability considerations for a distributed intermediary in collaborative blockchain contexts, and robust security measures against potential vulnerabilities and attacks. Analysis and evaluation results indicate that ForensiCross is secure and, despite a slight increase in communication time, outperforms in node count efficiency and has secure provenance extraction. As an all-encompassing solution, ForensiCross aims to simplify collaborative investigations by ensuring data integrity and traceability.