Securing crime case summary and E-FIR using blockchain concept

Abstract

Electronic First Information Report (e-FIR) is a basic document filed to the police stations by a victim or someone on his/her behalf when a cognizable offense such as murder, kidnapping, rape, theft, etc. is committed. In the e-FIR database, the offense&s;s record can be compromised due to its centralized nature, and further the intentional registration of false e-FIR can occur. Thus, data integrity and transparency are key concerns in e-FIR database. In this paper, e-FIR data integrity and false registration appended with police stations in a centralized database are addressed via a consensus-based distributed blockchain solution, as an integral part of a smart city environment. Specifically, a smart contract based intelligent framework has been utilized to explore the potential of Ethereum blockchain in providing integrity to e-FIR data stored in a police station&s;s database. Local database is interfaced with Ethereum blockchain using Web3 Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. Multiple simulations have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. Our results show a trade-off between different hashing algorithm security level for the offenses data and number of transactions stored in a single block on blockchain ledger.