Blockchain based digital forensics investigation framework in the internet of things and social systems

The decentralised nature of blockchain technologies can well match the needs of integrity and provenances of evidences collecting in digital forensics across jurisdictional borders. In this work, a novel blockchain based digital forensics investigation framework in the Internet of Things (IoT) and social systems environment is proposed, which can provide proof of existence and privacy preservation for evidence items examination. To implement such features, we present a block enabled forensics framework for IoT, namely IoT forensic chain (IoTFC), which can offer forensic investigation with good authenticity, immutability, traceability, resilience, and distributed trust between evidential entitles as well as examiners. The IoTFC can deliver a gurantee of traceability and track provenance of evidence items. Details of evidence identification, preservation, analysis, and presentation will be recorded in chains of block. The IoTFC can increase trust of both evidence items and examiners by providing transparency of the audit train. The use case demonstrated the effectiveness of proposed method