Secure Access Control of Digital Evidence Using Biometric-Enhanced Attribute-Based Encryption

Digital Forensics is the process of identifying, pre-serving, collecting evidence, and analyzing and presenting it, while maintaining the integrity and admissibility of all evidence, in the court of law. The currently available systems are lacking some values like Distributed Trust among stakeholders, keeping the integrity of evidences and to ensure they are tamper-proof, making the whole investigation process more transparent so that the victims can track the necessary details of the investigation, and if they find anything doubtful or suspicious, they should be able to report it in the court of law. So, we try to incorporate these values into our research work, where we introduce the idea of using Blockchain, a distributed network that provides the feature of distributed trust. The immutable nature of blockchain ensures the integrity of the evidence and makes the evidence tamper-resistant, since a block of information added by a stakeholder cannot be modified. We named our system BioCryptor, a safe system that uses attributebased encryption supplemented by biometrics to provide better access control. To guarantee individ-ualized access to data, the system uses cipher text policy attribute-based encryption using a user's face biometrics as an attribute. Solidity is used to write smart contracts, and the prototype is tested on the Ganache local network.