Internet-of-Forensic (IoF): A blockchain based digital forensics framework for IoT applications

Gulshan Kumar, Rahul Saha, Chhagan Lal, Mauro Conti

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

35 Citations (Scopus)
51 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Digital forensic in Internet-of-Thing (IoT) paradigm is critical due to its heterogeneity and lack of transparency of evidence processing. Moreover, cross-border legalization makes a hindrance in such process pertaining to the cloud forensic issues. This urges a forensic framework for IoT which provides distributed computing, decentralization, and transparency of forensic investigation of digital evidences in cross-border perspectives. To this end, we propose a framework for IoT forensics that addresses the above mentioned issues. The proposed solution called Internet-of-Forensics (IoF) considers a blockchain tailored IoT framework for digital forensics. It provides a transparent view of the investigation process that involves all the stakeholders (e.g., heterogeneous devices, and cloud service providers) in a single framework. It uses blockchain-based case chain to deal with the investigation process including chain-of-custody and evidence chain. Consensus is used for consortium to solve the problems of cross-border legalization. This is also beneficial for a transparent and ease of forensic reference. The programmable lattice-based cryptographic primitives produce reduced complexities. It shows benefits for power-aware devices and puts an add-on to the novelty of the presented idea. IoF is generic; hence, it can be used by autonomous security operation centers, cyber-forensic investigators and manually initiated evidences under chain-of-custody for man-made crimes. Security services are assured as required by the framework. IoF is experimented and compared with the other state-of-the-art frameworks. The outcomes and analysis prove the efficiency of IoF concerning complexity, time consumption, memory and CPU utilization, gas consumption, and energy analysis.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13-25
Number of pages13
JournalFuture Generation Computer Systems
Volume120
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Accepted author manuscript

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Cloud
  • Custody
  • Digital
  • Forensics
  • IoT
  • Security

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