Utang Rosidin, Dewi Mayaningsih, Muhammad Yahya Wahyudin
The authenticity of state legal documents in the digital system constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for legal certainty and governmental accountability. This study aims to analyze the regulatory vacuum in chain of custody standards within Indonesia's digital archival administrative law, examine the urgency and conceptual foundations of chain of custody as an instrument for guaranteeing the authenticity of state legal documents, and formulate a reconstruction model based on chain of custody through the integration of cryptographic and blockchain technologies. This research employs a normative legal method utilizing statute, conceptual, and comparative approaches. The findings reveal: first, a structurally embedded rechtvacuum exists in Indonesia's digital archival administrative law, wherein none of the six primary legal instruments analyzed explicitly regulates digital chain of custody standards as a mandatory mechanism, reflecting regulatory misalignment that undermines the legal certainty of state documents; second, the chain of custody doctrine requiring five core parameters of documentation continuity, evidence integrity, authentication, expert verification, and corroborative reliability constitutes a conditio sine qua non for authenticity assurance of state legal documents in the digital age; third, this study formulates a Five-Layer Reconstruction Model integrating permissioned blockchain, SHA-256 cryptography, and smart contracts as the techno-normative infrastructure for a national chain of custody system, accompanied by recommendations for amending the Archival Law, the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, and the issuance of a new Supreme Court Regulation on blockchain-based digital document authentication