Jonathan Crawford, Andrew Folsom, Vananh Vo, Angela Dana Tante · 6 authors
Water contamination is a primary concern in a region where water and petroleum play such vital roles in the economy, and where both industry and regulatory agencies pay close attention to environmental quality. In this research, we built a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based prototype using R3 Corda. Its purpose applies in the oil & gas underground injection control (UIC) operations for the underground aquifer protection. This DLT prototype is a permissioned network which allows oil & gas companies to create, disseminate and trace immutable records. This network allows oil & gas companies, state agencies, and all other participants to share secure records such as well information while maintaining data integrity, traceability, and security. With the underlying cryptographic technologies of DLT, any unauthorized changes to the information, ownership or its history will become infeasible.
Evidence management is crucial in the field of forensic science. Evidences obtained from a crime scene are important in solving the case and delivering justice to the parties involved. Hence, protecting these evidences from any form of alteration is of utmost important. Chain of Custody is the process which maintains the integrity of evidence. Inability to maintain the chain of custody will make the evidence inadmissible in court, eventually leading to the case dismissal. Digitalization of forensic evidence management system is a need of time as it is an environment friendly model. Blockchains are digitally distributed ledgers of transactions signed cryptographically in chronological order that are sorted into blocks and is completely open to anyone in the blockchain network. Hyperledger Fabric is a consortium blockchain framework created by the Linux foundation and is mainly used for enterprise use. Based on the concept of Hyperledger Fabric, present study aimed to create a framework and further propose an algorithm to implement Blockchain Technology to digitalize forensic evidence management system and maintain Chain of Custody.
Due to the growing use of cloud services and the possible hazards involved with storing and processing sensitive data in remote locations, data security is a crucial concern in cloud computing. This literature review analyses the state of the art in data security research for cloud computing and emphasises the major discoveries, difficulties, and recommendations for the future. Encryption, access control, network security, physical security, security monitoring, data segregation, backup and disaster recovery, compliance, and safe development practises are just a few of the data security-related topics included in the assessment. The study notes that a problem is the size and quantity of the body of literature as well as the requirement to stay up with the continuously changing area. The need for thorough coverage, evaluation of source quality and reliability, and overcoming language and accessibility challenges are also mentioned as drawbacks. The review goes into further detail on issues including time limits, subjectivity in selection and interpretation, information overload, and integration and synthesis of findings. It is recommended that future research in data security for cloud computing put a particular emphasis on advanced encryption methods, secure data sharing and collaboration, privacy-preserving methods, cloud forensics, threat intelligence, machine learning, security assurance and auditing, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, as well as user awareness and education. Data security in cloud computing may be further reinforced to secure sensitive data and guarantee the reliability of cloud services by solving these issues and making progress in the sector.
Digital forensic in Internet-of-Thing (IoT) paradigm is critical due to its heterogeneity and lack of transparency of evidence processing. Moreover, cross-border legalization makes a hindrance in such process pertaining to the cloud forensic issues. This urges a forensic framework for IoT which provides distributed computing, decentralization, and transparency of forensic investigation of digital evidences in cross-border perspectives. To this end, we propose a framework for IoT forensics that addresses the above mentioned issues. The proposed solution called Internet-of-Forensics (IoF) considers a blockchain tailored IoT framework for digital forensics. It provides a transparent view of the investigation process that involves all the stakeholders (e.g., heterogeneous devices, and cloud service providers) in a single framework. It uses blockchain-based case chain to deal with the investigation process including chain-of-custody and evidence chain. Consensus is used for consortium to solve the problems of cross-border legalization. This is also beneficial for a transparent and ease of forensic reference. The programmable lattice-based cryptographic primitives produce reduced complexities. It shows benefits for power-aware devices and puts an add-on to the novelty of the presented idea. IoF is generic; hence, it can be used by autonomous security operation centers, cyber-forensic investigators and manually initiated evidences under chain-of-custody for man-made crimes. Security services are assured as required by the framework. IoF is experimented and compared with the other state-of-the-art frameworks. The outcomes and analysis prove the efficiency of IoF concerning complexity, time consumption, memory and CPU utilization, gas consumption, and energy analysis.
With the increasing number of cybercrimes, the digital forensics team has no choice but to implement more robust and resilient evidence-handling mechanisms. The capturing of digital evidence, which is a tangible and probative piece of information that can be presented in court and used in trial, is very challenging due to its volatility and improper handling procedures. When computer systems get compromised, digital forensics comes into play to analyze, discover, extract, and preserve all relevant evidence. Therefore, it is imperative to maintain efficient evidence management to guarantee the credibility and admissibility of digital evidence in a court of law. A critical component of this process is to utilize an adequate chain of custody (CoC) approach to preserve the evidence in its original state from compromise and/or contamination. In this paper, a practical and secure CustodyBlock (CB) model using private blockchain protocol and smart contracts to support the control, transfer, analysis, and preservation monitoring is proposed. The smart contracts in CB are utilized to enhance the model automation process for better and more secure evidence preservation and handling. A further research direction in terms of implementing blockchain-based evidence management ecosystems, and the implications on other different areas, are discussed.
Jieh‐Haur Chen, Mu‐Chun Su, Vidya Trisandini Azzizi, Ting-Kwei Wang · 5 authors
Technological developments have made the construction industry efficient. The aim of this research is to solve communication interaction problems to build a project management platform using the interactive concept of natural language processing technology. A comprehensive literature review and expert interviews associated with techniques dealing with natural languages suggests the proposed system containing the Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), and Bi-directional Recurrent Neutral Networks Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (BRNN-CNN) toolboxes to extract the key words for construction projects contracts. The results show that a fully automatic platform facilitating contract management is achieved. For academic domains, the Contract Keyword Detection (CKD) mechanism integrating PSENet, CRNN, and BRNN-CNN approaches to cope with real-time massive document flows is novel in the construction industry. For practice, the proposed approach brings significant reduction for manpower and human error, an alternative for settling down misunderstanding or disputes due to real-time and precise communication, and a solution for efficient documentary management. It connects all contract stakeholders proficiently.
A blockchain can be summarized as a decentralized ledger of all transactions across a peer-to-peer network. It is the primary technology behind the large number of diverse cryptocurrencies that are currently available in circulation. Since its introduction, blockchain technology has shown promising application prospects and attracted much attention from academia and industry. It also has become an obvious target for adversaries. In this paper, we conduct a review of the implementation of digital forensic investigation processes to blockchain and cryptocurrency. Based on our findings, we can conclude that digital forensics is still considered a new area for blockchain technology, especially in cryptocurrency.
Digital and Cyber Forensics
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sarah Khadijah Taylor, Aswami Ariffin, Khairul Akram Zainol Ariffin, Siti Norul Huda Sheikh Abdullah
The steady growth of cryptowallets users and the widespread of cryptocurrencies adoption has inadvertently risen the numbers of cybercrime. The decentralized and pseudo-anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies impose a unique challenge to the investigators. Unlike investigation on fiat currency where banks can be contacted to freeze account, cryptocurrencies do not have a centralized entity that can be contacted. On top of that, studies have shown that using a generic digital forensics methodology to collect and preserve cryptowallets, which often involves imaging and seizing, are ineffective for cryptocurrencies investigation. This is because criminals can recover his seized cryptowallets into other devices and thus continue to make transactions for illegal activities. This defeats the purpose of halting the criminals from conducting further crimes. Hence in this study we propose a methodology for preserving cryptowallets at crime scene. We then conducted evaluation on the methodology by using real case and simulation exercise on different types of cryptowallets. The result shows that our methodology can be used to properly preserve cryptocurrencies evidence. This study aims to identify gaps in cryptocurrencies investigation and address them by proposing a proper methodology.
Dylan Eck, Gaby G. Dagher, Adam Torek, Steve Cutchin
Crypto currencies, specifically Bitcoin, are commonly used for illegal activities. In order to aid in preventing this, and catching users who behave in illegal activities, it is useful to be able to establish links between addresses based on the publicly available transaction data stored on the blockchain. While multiple methods of doing this for bitcoin have been proposed already, none attempt to determine the flows of bitcoin through many-to-many transactions. We use publicly available blockchain data along with an existing method for untangling many-to-many transactions in order to test the effectiveness of three different address clustering heuristics in simplifying many-to-many transactions. As of the deadline to submit this abstract, we have not concluded our experiments and do not have final results.
Since digital forensics becomes more and more popular, more and more attention has been paid to the originality and validity of data, and data preservation technology emerges as the times require. However, the current data preservation models and technologies are only the combination of cryptography technology, and there is a risk of being attacked and cracked. And in the process of data preservation, human participation is also needed, which may lead to data tampering. To solve problems given, this paper presents a data preservation model based on blockchain and multidimensional hash. With the decentralization and smart contract characteristics of blockchain, data can be automatically preserved without human participation to form a branch chain of custody in the unit of case, and blockchain has good antiattack performance, which is the so‐called 51% attack. Meanwhile, in order to solve the problem of data confusion and hard to query caused by the excessive number of cases, hash, cryptography, and timestamps are used to form a serialized main chain of custody. Because of the confliction problem of hash and judicial trial needs to absolutely guarantee the authenticity and validity of data, multidimensional hash is used to replace regular hash. In this way, the data preservation becomes an automatic, nonhuman‐interventional process. Experiments have been carried out to show the security and effectiveness of the proposed model.
Due to businesses’ growing use of IoT services in their day-to-day operations and the increased use of smart devices, digital forensic investigations involving such systems will need increasingly sophisticated digital evidence collection and processing. The majority of IoT systems are composed of disparate software and hardware components, which may pose security and privacy concerns. Recently, blockchain technology was presented as one of the options for achieving IoT security via the use of an immutable ledger, a decentralized architecture, and strong cryptographic primitives. Integrating blockchain platforms with IoT-based applications, on the other hand, poses a number of difficulties owing to the trustworthiness, integrity, and real-time responsiveness of IoT data. However, certain IoT devices may be incompatible with existing blockchain-based IoT forensic methods for additional digital evidence processing owing to their usage of conventional hash. A critical feature of cryptographic hash functions is that even if just one bit of the input is altered, the output acts pseudo-randomly, making it impossible to identify identical files. However, in the field of computer forensics, it is essential to locate comparable files (e.g., various versions of a file); therefore, we need a hash function that preserves similarity. It is getting more difficult to establish how forensic investigators might utilize traces from such devices. To effectively deal with IoT digital forensics applications, this article presents an improved blockchain-based IoT digital forensics architecture that use fuzzy hash to construct the Blockchain’s Merkle tree in addition to the conventional hash for authentication. Fuzzy hashing enables the identification of potentially damning documents that might otherwise remain undiscovered using conventional hashing techniques. By comparing blocks/files to all nodes in the blockchain network using fuzzy hash similarity, the digital forensics investigator will be able to verify their authenticity. To support the proof of concept, we simulated the suggested model.
Open access
Digital and Cyber Forensics
Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
It has become a truism that the speed of technological progress leaves law and policy scrambling to keep up. But in addition to creating new challenges, technological advances also enable new improvements to issues at the intersection of law and technology. In this thesis, I develop new cryptographic tools for informing and improving our law and policy, including specific technical innovations and analysis of the limits of possible interventions. First, I present a cryptographic analysis of a legal question concerning the limits of the Fifth Amendment: can courts legally compel people to decrypt their devices? Our cryptographic analysis is useful not only for answering this specific question about encrypted devices, but also for analyzing questions about the wider legal doctrine. The second part of this thesis turns to algorithmic fairness. With the rise of automated decision-making, greater attention has been paid to statistical notions of fairness and equity. In this part of the work, I demonstrate technical limits of those notions and examine a relaxation of those notions; these analyses should inform legal or policy interventions. Finally, the third section of this thesis describes several methods for improving zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge, which allow a prover to convince a verifier of some property without revealing anything beyond the fact of the prover's knowledge. The methods in this work yield a concrete proof size reduction of two plausibly post-quantum styles of proof with transparent setup that can be made non-interactive via the Fiat-Shamir transform: "MPC-in-the-head," which is a linear-size proof that is fast, low-memory, and has few assumptions, and "Ligero," a sublinear-size proof achieving a balance between proof size and prover runtime. We will describe areas where zero-knowledge proofs in general can provide new, currently-untapped functionalities for resolving legal disputes, proving adherence to a policy, executing contracts, and enabling the sale of information without giving it away.
Open access
Cryptography and Data Security
Digital and Cyber Forensics
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Mueen Uddin, Aftab Ahmed Shaikh, Asif Ali Laghari · 5 authors
Due to globalization and worldwide connectivity, multimedia data exchange has increased significantly over the Internet in the last decade. The life cycle of multimedia content is also getting more multifaceted as more people are accessing, sharing, modifying and re-using multimedia information. This poses serious challenges for the multimedia industry to provide integrity, reliability and trustworthiness for multimedia investigations against the growing cybersecurity threats. This paper bridges this gap by enabling a secure and transparent digital forensic investigations process using blockchain technology. MF-Ledger a Blockchain Hyperledger sawtooth-enabled novel, secure and efficient digital forensic investigation architecture is proposed where participating stakeholders create a private network to exchange and agree on different investigation activities before being stored on the blockchain ledger. We have created digital contracts (smart contracts) and implemented them using sequence diagrams to handle the stakeholders' secure interaction in the investigation process. The proposed architectural solution delivers robust information integrity, prevention, and preservation mechanism to permanently and immutably store the evidence (chain of custody) in a private permissioned encrypted blockchain ledger.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Digital and Cyber Forensics
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the advancing technologies become tools for illicit activities and avoid detection, digital forensics is necessary for law enforcement in modern criminal investigations. In order to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the evidence, a chain of custody is essential for the successful prosecution of criminals in court. However, it is a great challenge to manage the preservation and collection of digital evidence because of its fragile and volatile in nature. Blockchain has been proposed as a promising and reliable technology to provide immutability and traceability of digital content, however, the applications of blockchain to the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) requires special attention to the security issue. In this research, we proposed a blockchain of custody framework to facilitate the security and transparency of digital evidence in criminal investigation process. The framework is implement on Ethereum smart contract to support authenticity and integrity of digital evidence in preliminary investigation, case management and court phases. We also propose the role of investigator to leverage access control in evidence creation, transferring and modification. The corresponding actions with judicial process is simulated using private ethereum blockchain. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can prevent digital evidence been tampered or contaminated and assure its legal defensibility with rigorous privilege management. Moreover, by successfully synchronizing digital evidence transactions to multiple nodes ensures the accountability of evidence data for every involved law enforcement agency.
Luca Caviglione, Michał Choraś, Igino Corona, Artur Janicki · 7 authors
Cyber attacks are currently blooming, as the attackers reap significant profits from them and face a limited risk when compared to committing the “classical” crimes. One of the major components that leads to the successful compromising of the targeted system is malicious software. It allows using the victim’s machine for various nefarious purposes, e.g., making it a part of the botnet, mining cryptocurrencies, or holding hostage the data stored there. At present, the complexity, proliferation, and variety of malware pose a real challenge for the existing countermeasures and require their constant improvements. That is why, in this paper we first perform a detailed meta-review of the existing surveys related to malware and its detection techniques, showing an arms race between these two sides of a barricade. On this basis, we review the evolution of modern threats in the communication networks, with a particular focus on the techniques employing information hiding. Next, we present the bird’s eye view portraying the main development trends in detection methods with a special emphasis on the machine learning techniques. The survey is concluded with the description of potential future research directions in the field of malware detection.
Mamun Ahmed, Saha Reno, Nelofa Akter, Fahmida Haque
Forensic pathology applies medical skills and knowledge to a criminal inquiry that recognizes or develops the information regarding the accidental or unlawful death of an innocent person or the victims of significant physical injury. It is a legal process which collects, examines, analyzes and reports the evidence. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned and private blockchain structure which includes the present estimation of the element's property and the historical backdrop of transactions. In forensic department, every piece of evidence should be properly identified, collected, preserved, analyzed and finally admitted to the proper authority. But in reality assembling, evaluating, storing evidence is not secured enough. So in this paper, we are focused on creating a blockchain based medical forensic system using Hyperledger. The system can track any unauthorized access and modification by retrieving the Historian Record and Asset Registries and thus guarantees the impartiality of evidence, secrecy and validity of transactions.
Nathan Martindale, Scott Stewart, Mark Adams, Greg Westphal
In international nuclear safeguards, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is tasked with inspecting and verifying nuclear facilities and their activities. Data analytics and machine learning to support inspections require large amounts of data that nuclear facility operators may consider proprietary or sensitive, so the IAEA may not have full access. Allowing computation over private data without compromising its security therefore has value for safeguards inspections and analysis. Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) consists of security-focused techniques that allow data analytics and machine learning algorithms to run on sensitive data without revealing it. This includes ideas like homomorphic encryption (HE), secure multiparty computation (SMPC), and secure enclaves. HE allows algorithms and mathematical operations to be conducted directly on the encrypted data instead of first decrypting it. With SMPC, multiple entities collaboratively compute over distributed data such that no party is able to directly view any others’ original data. Secure enclaves allow computation to take place in a separate and heavily blocked-off section of a CPU. Techniques like these allow for several potential use cases in which the security of data is essential. With SMPC, machine learning models can be trained over the input data from multiple entities, resulting in a model that all users can benefit from without leaking the input data from any particular entity. With SMPC or a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), an algorithm returning some single answer or truth value can be run on someone else’s data without ever needing to see that data, potentially allowing for verification or proof of some underlying question. HE can allow for outsourcing computation on data to a hostile or untrusted environment. Although most of the research in this field resides within the health and financial domains, tools from PPML may have similar applications in nuclear safeguards. Allowing the IAEA to compute over proprietary information, such as process models and raw sensor data using PPML techniques, provides the baseline for running complex analytics without needing direct unencrypted access to the underlying data, maintaining its privacy. Important limitations to consider for these techniques include the efficiency and level of security required. The security of HE and SMPC come at the cost of speed—the significant amount of overhead means that algorithms implemented in these protocols and encryption schemes are slower than when run on plaintext. Additionally, several important parameters determine what techniques or protocols are used based on the security requirements. SMPC protocols may need to be selected for resistance against a party that attempts to deviate from the protocol to distort the result or gain access to additional information, and a protocol secure against these attacks may further increase the overhead of the algorithm.
Liang Shen, HAO Baozhong, Li Yang, Yu Han · 7 authors
Although the continuous construction of smart grid and power Internet of Things has brought massive data to grid enterprises, the cost of data storage, operation and maintenance is gradually increasing, on the contrary, the value of data has not been effectively mined and utilized, the main reason is that the current data asset management of State Grid Corporation of China is still an infancy stage, and still faces the problems of data aggregation quality, safety and compliance control, shared application scope, and management mechanism efficiency and so on. In order to solve the above problems, Big Data Center of State Grid Corporation of China takes advantage of the blockchain with distributed consensus autonomy and data storage, non-tampering and traceability, and business intelligence contract script, explores the application of blockchain in power grid data asset management, and then, tries to construct the architecture of power grid data asset management based on blockchain, which is to promote security compliance and open sharing of power grid data operation, and realize the efficient management and operation of power grid data assets.