Block Chain : Paving the way toward maintaining Forensic Chain of evidences.
Fusion of block chain and field of forensic science is creating a new era in providing the integrity and authenticity of wide range of digital evidences which may benefit the whole criminal justice system. As it is a known fact that the digital evidences are most vulnerable towards the tampering as it transfers from multiple hands during the collection and at the time of analysis too. So in order to ensure proper integrity and genuineness of an digital evidence the concept of block chain can be implemented. The block chain is capable enough in order to provide comprehensive tracking & tracing during whole of the procedure and hierarchy too.
When a crime is committed it is the duty of law enforcement agency to immediately reach toward the scene of crime and cordon the area in order to prevent any unlawful entry to the scene of crime after the commission of an offence, after cordoning the area the law enforcement agency i.e., police can process the scene of crime and it starts from searching the evidences, then its proper collection, preservation and forwarding the evidence for the purpose of scientific & technological analysis. This basic process if generally followed in most of the cases but processing the cyber crime cases is always a challenging task, but in that also the physical evidences if found at the scene of crime such as laptops, desktops, sim cards, SD-cards, hard disks, cables, wires, printers and other digital device must be preserved properly before the final analysis.
In the field of forensic science the chain of custody plays very important role as it contains the detail of all the individuals through which an evidence is passed from its collection to analysis. The chain of custody plays very important role criminal justice system as with its help the tampering in any evidence can be detected easily that is at what level the tampering in data or evidence is done, and via this the integrity of any evidence is maintained. Block chain in its simplicity is a series of connected data structure called blocks, which contains or tracks everything that happens on some distributed systems on a peer to peer to network. Each block is linked to and depends on previous block forming a chain, resulting in an append only system: a permanent and irreversible history that can be used as a real time audit trail by any participant to verify the accuracy of the records by simply reviewing data itself.
So by this blockchain technology can not only helps in providing and managing security to financial traffic but through this we can also use it in benefiting the society at large.
