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

该项目旨在探索开发电子证人的挑战-一个系统，允许平民使用他们的智能设备收集法医健全的多媒体证据。为了被认为是真实的和法医学上的声音，数字证据需要有一个未被篡改的证据，事件的时间和地点需要以一种不可改变的方式证明。由于各种具有挑战性的要求：用户友好的应用程序界面，公正，抗共谋和保护隐私的时间戳服务以及准确的位置证明，这种对法医学上可靠和匿名证据收集的研究是困难的。每个方面的有效性都需要得到证明，以建立一个强大的系统。该项目的首要回报是它能够实时记录和验证事实，同时对收集到的证据进行法医问责。电子证人的组成部分包括：（a）一个安全的智能手机应用程序，（B）一个时间戳服务，作为由个人矿工维护的公共区块链实施，以及（c）一个位置证明服务，提供对证据设备报告的位置真实性的信心。将开发一个原型，并将对试验台部署进行性能分析，以确保系统所有组成部分的正确性。将进行一项涉及大学用户的试点研究，以确定大规模部署的挑战。

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.