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

该项目旨在探索开发E-Witness的挑战--这是一个允许平民使用智能设备收集具有取证效力的多媒体证据的系统。为了被认为是真实的和取证合理的，数字证据需要有未被篡改的证明，并且事件的时间和地点需要以不可改变的方式证明。由于各种具有挑战性的要求：用户友好的应用界面、无偏见、抗共谋和隐私保护的时间戳服务以及准确的位置证明，对取证可靠和匿名证据收集的研究是困难的。需要证明每个方面的有效性才能构建一个健壮的系统。这个项目最重要的回报是它能够实时记录和验证事实，同时对收集的证据进行法医问责。E-Witness的组成部分包括：(A)安全的智能手机应用程序；(B)作为公共区块链由个人矿工维护的时间戳服务；以及(C)提供对证据装置所报告位置的真实性的信心的位置证明服务。将开发一个原型，并在试验台部署上进行性能分析，以确保系统所有组件的正确性。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.