A Study on the Integrity Assurance of CRIME Digital Evidence

Abstract

With advances in digital technologies, vast quantities of information have been processed and reported in a digital form. This has resulted in an increase in the scale and number of crimes related to digital information, and the relative importance of digital evidence in criminal proceedings has also increased significantly. In addition, it is a reality that such a huge amount of evidence is confiscated in a digital form at the crime scene and submitted to the court, but digital evidence is still not recognized as satisfactory proof due to its characteristics as well as insufficient legal and institutional support. Likewise, although the importance of digital evidence continues to increase, there is still a lack of research on the technologies and procedures to ensure integrity, such as the prevention of forgery and tampering with acquired digital evidence. Since digital evidence is easily altered, tampered with or destroyed through improper handling, it has been faced with a challenge of securing the reliability of investigation and ensuring its integrity. Therefore, it is required to devise measures to ensure the integrity of digital evidence so that digital evidence can be accepted as legally valid in court. In this regard, this study proposed a method to guarantee the integrity of digital evidence by using blockchain technology that allows all nodes in the network to share distributed database securely without the use of a central server, and thus can prevent the forgery and tampering with data. The use of this method is expected to reduce the time and cost burden, while ensuring a high level of integrity.