SECURE STORAGE OF DIGITAL FORENSIC EVIDENCE WITH AUTHENTICATION AND ENCRYPTION

Digital evidence may be copied, altered or overwritten with little effort; its evidential value depends on secure acquisition, preservation and examination. This paperpresents a literature-based analysis of a secure storage model described by Alashjaee and Alqahtani. The DFA-AOKGE architecture combines blockchain-distributedstorage, the Secure Block Verification Mechanism (SBVM), Enhanced Equilibrium Optimizer (EEO)-based key generation and multikey homomorphic encryption(MHE). The paper outlines the evidence lifecycle, authentication and authorization, integrity verification, key management, audit records and chain of custody. It alsoconsiders related work on IoT forensics, explainable forensic AI, adversarial file-fragment classification and SDN-oriented evidence gathering. The analysis identifiespractical concerns involving end-to-end trust, metadata leakage, cryptographic overhead, failure recovery and reproducibility. No new implementation or experimentsare claimed; reported findings remain attributed to the original sources, and the proposed workflow is presented as a basis for systematic validation.