Adoption of Chain of Custody Improves Digital Forensic Investigation Process

Abstract

Chain of custody plays an important role in determine integrity of digital evidence, because the chain of custody works on a proof that evidence has not been altered or changed through all phases, and must include documentation on how evidence is gathered, transported, analyzed and presented.

The aims of this work is first to find out how the chain of custody has been applied to a wide range of models of the digital forensic investigation process for more than ten years. Second, a review of the methods on digitally signing an evidence that achieves the successful implementation of chain of custody through answering a few questions "who, when, where, why, what and how", and thus providing digital evidence to be accepted by the court. Based on the defined aims an experimental environment is being setup to outline practically an acceptable method in chain of custody procedure. Therefore, we have adopted SHA512 for hashing and regarding encryption RSA and GnuGP is applied where according to the defined requirement a combination of this algorithms could be adopted as a practical method.