- Title
- Practical application of distributed ledger technology in support of digital evidence integrity verification processes
- Creator
- Weilbach, William Thomas
- Subject
- Digital forensic science
- Subject
- Blockchains (Databases)
- Subject
- Bitcoin
- Subject
- Distributed databases
- Subject
- Computer systems Verification
- Date Issued
- 2018
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- text
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MSc
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61872
- Identifier
- vital:28070
- Description
- After its birth in cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger (blockchain) technology rapidly grew in popularity in other technology domains. Alternative applications of this technology range from digitizing the bank guarantees process for commercial property leases (Anz and IBM, 2017) to tracking the provenance of high-value physical goods (Everledger Ltd., 2017). As a whole, distributed ledger technology has acted as a catalyst to the rise of many innovative alternative solutions to existing problems, mostly associated with trust and integrity. In this research, a niche application of this technology is proposed for use in digital forensics by providing a mechanism for the transparent and irrefutable verification of digital evidence, ensuring its integrity as established blockchains serve as an ideal mechanism to store and validate arbitrary data against. Evaluation and identification of candidate technologies in this domain is based on a set of requirements derived from previous work in this field (Weilbach, 2014). OpenTimestamps (Todd, 2016b) is chosen as the foundation of further work for its robust architecture, transparent nature and multi-platform support. A robust evaluation and discussion of OpenTimestamps is performed to reinforce why it can be trusted as an implementation and protocol. An implementation of OpenTimestamps is designed for the popular open source forensic tool, Autopsy, and an Autopsy module is subsequently developed and released to the public. OpenTimestamps is tested at scale and found to have insignificant error rates for the verification of timestamps. Through practical implementation and extensive testing, it is shown that OpenTimestamps has the potential to significantly advance the practice of digital evidence integrity verification. A conclusion is reached by discussing some of the limitations of OpenTimestamps in terms of accuracy and error rates. It is shown that although OpenTimestamps has very specific timing claims in the attestation, with a near zero error rate, the actual attestation is truly accurate to within a day. This is followed by proposing potential avenues for future work.
- Format
- 158 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Science, Computer Science
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Weilbach, William Thomas
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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