An Investigation into the Feasibility of using Distributed Digital Ledger technology for Digital Forensics for Industrial IoT

Abstract

The domain of Digital Forensics for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the proposed use of a Distributed Digital Ledger (DDL), has for the most part been theoretical in nature within the current literature. The work in this paper explores the practical feasibility of using DDL technology for Digital Forensics in the IIOT context. We detail a new methodology for testing the performance of writing to and reading from a DDL in an IIOT environment, and present findings on the overhead associated with storing and retrieving IIoT transactions in a DDL. We conclude that while it is possible to build and use a DDL for storing IIoT transactions, there are limitations to the number of sensors that can be supported by a single implementation and the time it takes to retrieve transactions may be too high to be practical for Digital Forensics.