EAGER: Collaborative Research: E-Witness: Preserve and Prove Forensic Soundness of Digital Evidence

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This project seeks to explore the challenges of developing E-Witness - a system that allows civilians to use their smart devices to collect forensically sound multimedia evidence. In order to be considered authentic and forensically sound, a digital evidence needs to have a proof of being untampered and the time and location of the event needs to be attested in a way that it is immutable. Such research on forensically sound and anonymous evidence gathering is hard due to various challenging requirements: user friendly application interface, unbiased, collusion-resistant and privacy-preserving time-stamping service as well as accurate location attestation. The effectiveness of each aspect needs to be proved to build a robust system. The overarching reward of this project is its ability to record and validate facts in real-time while bringing forensic accountability to such collected evidence. The building blocks of E-Witness consist of: (a) a secure smart phone application, (b) a time-stamping service implemented as a public blockchain maintained by individual miners, and (c) a location-attestation service that provides confidence on the truthfulness of the location reported by the evidence device. A prototype will be developed and performance analysis will be performed over a testbed deployment to ensure correctness of all components of the system. A pilot study involving University users will be performed to identify the challenges of a large-scale deployment.