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14 ^{Role of Blockchain}

Technology in

Digital Forensics

Keshav Kaushik, Susheela Dahiya

and Rewa Sharma

14.1  INTRODUCTION TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Blockchain technology is gaining popularity in the present time due to its prop­

erties, such as peer-to-peer transaction, persistency, anonymity, immutability and

decentralized behaviour. The concept of blockchain emerged from the bitcoin cryp­

tocurrency proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto (Nakamoto, n.d.). It is a distributed and

decentralized digital ledger having a consensus of various economic transaction

schemes. The term bitcoin was coined in the year 2008; it was the earliest cryptocur­

rency, which later gave rise to more than 2000 cryptocurrencies. The usage of bitcoin

is not adopted worldwide because of various issues like illegal mining performance

(Dev, 2014), anti-money laundering (Moser et al., 2013) and the time consumed in

the transaction validation and mining process (Battista et al., 2015; Beikverdi &

Song, 2015; Wijaya, 2017). In this digital world, unreliable transmission channels

are often used to transfer information from one point to another. Blockchain technol­

ogy can be applied where any digital data requires to be stored, executed, verified or

updated among several users with transparency, privacy, trust and security, without

control by any central authority. Blockchain technology offers reliable peer-to-peer

communication, thus ensuring the security and privacy of users. Once a transaction

is recorded, it can be read publicly but can’t be modified. Blockchain can be specified

CONTENTS

14.1 Introduction to Blockchain Technology........................................................235

14.2 Application Areas of Blockchain Technology...............................................236

14.3 Challenges and Protocols of Blockchain Technology...................................237

14.3.1 Challenges Faced by Blockchain Technology...................................237

14.3.2 Blockchain Architecture and Protocols.............................................238

14.4 Managing Chain of Custody for Digital Evidence: Ethereum...................... 241

14.5 Managing Chain of Custody for Digital Evidence: Hyperledger..................242

14.6 Applying Blockchain for Distributed Cloud Storage in Digital Forensics....... 244

14.7 Conclusion.....................................................................................................245

References...............................................................................................................245

DOI:  10.1201/9781003138082-14