Title: You are safe when you tell the truth: a blockchain-based privacy-preserving evidence collection and distribution system for digital forensics

Authors: Junjie Xiong; Biyi Lin

Addresses: Shenzhen Huasai Ruifei Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; School of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation, Maanshan University, Maanshan, Anhui, China ' Shenzhen Huasai Ruifei Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; School of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation, Maanshan University, Maanshan, Anhui, China

Abstract: With the development of information technology, digital evidence has played a crucial role in court trial. However, digital evidence incurs serious security threats and privacy issues in the process of collection, storage and distribution, and the real scenarios also raise the requirements of openness and transparency in evidence-related operation. To satisfy the above requirements, some existing research works provide transparency, immutability, and public auditability of evidence-related operations. However, they do not give a specific cryptographic schemes, or do not cover the whole evidence management process, or suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address the above issues, in this paper we proposed a blockchain-based and privacy-preserving evidence collection and distribution system that covers the whole evidence management process for digital forensics. This scheme uses certificateless signature and attribute-based encryption schemes to attain the security and privacy-preserving evidence collection and distribution, and provides flexible keyword search and access policy update over the ciphertext. We rigorously conducted security proof and the security analysis. The comparison and experimental results show that the proposed system is practical and efficient in the blockchain-based digital forensics scenario, and is superior to relevant works in performance.

Keywords: digital forensics; blockchain; data sharing; attribute-based encryption; ABE; privacy-preserving.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2022.126755

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2022 Vol.19 No.1/2, pp.210 - 236

Received: 29 Jan 2021
Accepted: 13 Jul 2021
Published online: 04 Nov 2022 *

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