Applications of Blockchain Technologies in Digital Forensics and Threat Hunting

Abstract

With the recent developments in many technologies, a novel concept “blockchain” was introduced in 2009 as a cryptocurrency application by some anonymous name or group of people. Today, this concept “blockchain” is changing every possible application. The future world will belong to a decentralized structure (Blockchain 4.0), i.e. everything is moving toward decentralized structures like decentralized network, decentralized web, etc. Apart from that, when we talk about the Internet network, then we look at mitigating several cyberthreats on many web applications. Note that, over 80% of web applications and websites are being attacked (facing breaches of information) everyday by third-party attackers (internally and/or externally). By and large, attackers work or take data from within an association or work inside the victim’s framework, which is undetected for quite a long time or even years. For this, several attempts are being made by many researchers to avoid such dangerous attacks on the cyber world. Indeed, even constant checking and real-time alerting is not sufficient alone to reduce hazards (i.e. these attacks). We additionally require proficient and smoothed out work processes to quickly get alerts, analyze root causes (foundations of an attack), remediate dangers, and proactively search for new ones (probability of new attack on a framework or organization). In this chapter, we will provide complete information about how blockchain technology can be useful in digital forensics and threat hunting over the Internet/cyberspace. Also, this research work provides an in-depth view of threat hunting in memory, file systems, and network data, and an introductory analysis of malicious programs. In continuation of this, this article will also discuss several useful components like asset management, risk and vulnerability management, threat detection, and response, threat hunting using live box forensics, cyberthreat hunting, and digital forensics, etc., for hunting threats using blockchain technology (in various useful application like e-healthcare, defense, etc.). In summary, this research work provides descriptions about applications of blockchain technology in digital forensics (or computer forensics, an application of scientific investigatory techniques into digital crimes and attacks), and the threat hunting (identification of threats) process (i.e., in many applications) in detail.