Two-Level Blockchain System for Digital Crime Evidence Management

Digital evidence, such as evidence from CCTV and event data recorders, is highly valuable in criminal investigations, and is used as definitive evidence in trials. However, there are risks when digital evidence obtained during the investigation of a case is managed through a physical hard disk drive until it is submitted to the court. Previous studies have focused on the integrated management of digital evidence in a centralized system, but if a centralized system server is attacked, major operations and investigation information may be leaked. Therefore, there is a need to reliably manage digital evidence and investigation information using blockchain technology in a distributed system environment. However, when large amounts of data—such as evidence videos—are stored in a blockchain, the data that must be processed only within one block before being created increase, causing performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a two-level blockchain system that separates digital evidence into hot and cold blockchains. In the criminal investigation process, information that frequently changes is stored in the hot blockchain, and unchanging data such as videos are stored in the cold blockchain. To evaluate the system, we measured the storage and inquiry processing performance of digital crime evidence videos according to the different capacities in the two-level blockchain system.