Multi-Party Consensus-based Blockchain for Chain of Custody in Iot Forensic Investigations

The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart environments has led to a new era for digital forensics. As IoT devices become increasingly prevalent in homes, cities, and workplaces, they serve as silent observers of everyday human activities. Recent studies have investigated how network traces from these devices could be leveraged to support forensic investigations. However, this approach requires large-scale data collection while ensuring the confidentiality, anonymity, and integrity of the collected traces. This work advances the field of IoT forensics by introducing Chain4ensic, a blockchain-based chain-of-custody (CoC) framework designed to preserve network traces extracted from IoT devices in a secure way. The proposed framework utilizes Ethereum smart contracts and edge computing to preserve the integrity and traceability of digital evidence. Additionally, the proposed system facilitates public notifications of data access once authorized by a court of justice. The architecture is developed as an opensource solution and evaluated in a smart home scenario, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness in real-life applications. The results indicate low resource usage, high throughput, and small gas consumption, making it a promising approach to tackle the challenges of storing sensitive data from participants in IoT forensic investigations.