Electronic Evidence in the Blockchain Era

 

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence- Carl Sagan”

With the developing years, unanticipated innovation has occurred and with developing innovation fraudsters are discovering advanced approaches to carry out criminal acts with new strategies and using the cloak of anonymity. With the rising cyber-crimes across the globe, digital forensics and digital evidence have become the need of great importance. Any place you go, you leave footprints is a well-founded fact in the world of cyberspace commonly known as ‘digital footprints' as timestamps, metadata and so forth which is very important to serve the principle of natural justice.

We use digital evidence such as CCTV footage or any online transaction history detail, etc. all these are highly valuable in a criminal investigation and can at as a piece of deciding evidence in the court of law. But ever thought of risks involved in it via managing these evidence though physical medium says hard disks and ever imagined what all changes is possible in the way of the evidence reaching the court.

The smoking gun with this evidence is to guarantee integrity, suitability and authenticity of these as they move in many levels of custody during cybercrime investigation say from the investigating officer to the forensic expert and so on. These chances of alteration or tampering of evidence can be solved to an extent using blockchain technology. This can be a conflicted topic to discuss but we have to separate the success of blockchain from the downsides of the Bitcoin scilicet cryptocurrency. The technology behind this is, DLT (distributer ledger technology) which can turn out to be a missing solution for managing digital evidence shared across the globe between different agencies.

There are few goals that we intend to achieve from introducing blockchain management into this era of digital evidence:

·   It would be a versatile software that can be used by anyone ranging from police officers to a wider public audience. This software will eventually be integrated into body cameras, but until then, it is extremely safe to use.

·    The information shall remain secured, more than it can ever be in physical space. Only the evidence’s fingerprint is shared on the Ethereum blockchain network. This process is done with extreme efficiency amongst a distributed network of nodes. However, evidence is still released at the discretion of the police.

·   This increases the confidence of the public in the justice system, which is a pillar of democracy, the moment the public stopped believing in the justice system, they will lose trust in the justice delivery system and our system may collapse. This digital evidence solution uses robust security methods to ensure that only police departments are able to upload video fingerprints and the public can feel confident that any digital evidence was untampered and resented before the court as it was.

·   It will be lighting fast as uploading or verifying evidence would be in a blink of an eye, wherever, whenever. This can become the world’s first security protocol designed to cross-reference with the digital evidence fingerprints that police presents in the court with the hashes stored on the blockchain, which would be the same if the evidence is untampered.

There are a number of countries that are taking cutting edge advantage of blockchain:

• CHINA- Hangzhou Huatai Media Culture Media Co. Ltd. v. Shenzhen Daotong Technology Development Co. Ltd., in this case, screenshots were primary evidence that was deciding the case and authenticity of such was given by storing data in the blockchain. The court here rechecked and confirmed the integrity of the evidence and it was submitted to the court through the mentioned platform.
• US- US courts have accepted the management system of blockchain recording digital evidence with an electronic signature. This will move a step ahead in digitalization which is certainly the need of the hour, as the businesses started making smart contracts to maintain secure corporate records in a user-friendly way.
• UK- UK’s Ministry of Justice announced a program known as “pilot program” which laid the foundation of a blockchain evidence system. This aims to solve the challenges of evidence sharing while keeping a full proof audit trial.

Conclusion

It is very challenging to ensure the integrity and authenticity of the evidence not to mention the added work on the digital forensics expert, and with growing cyber-crime in India it is very important to have some firm laws against digital forensics to make court trials easy and fast as well said: “Justice delayed is justice denied”. This will bring a huge difference in cost, as it will Blockchain technology will turn out to be a huge turning point in the evolution of digital evidence.

 

 

By: Shivangi Verma

(B.Tech + LLB), UPES

 

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