Law Enforcement Authorities' Legal Digital Evidence Gathering: Legal, Integrity and Chain-of-Custody Requirement

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jyri Rajamaki ◽  
Juha Knuuttila
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Chain Of Custody ◽  
Evidence Gathering

Disclosure, Security, Technology

2021 ◽  
pp. 100-116
Author(s):  
Darryl K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Information Disclosure ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Security Technology ◽  
Evidence Gathering ◽  
Disclosure Rules ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Trial Evidence

Criminal disclosure rules in all common law jurisdictions are organized around the same sets of conflicting aims. Pre-trial evidence disclosure is essential to fair and accurate adjudication. Yet certain types of information, such as identities of undercover operatives and ongoing law enforcement surveillance, must be kept confidential. Beyond these tensions, disclosure practices face new challenges arising primarily from evolving technology and investigative tactics. This chapter describes divergent approaches across common law jurisdictions—especially among U.S. states—to these challenges and offers explanations for their differences. It also sketches the technology-based challenges that discovery schemes face and offers options, or tentative predictions about their resolution. Differences often turn on who decides whether to withhold information from the defense—judges or prosecutors—and when certain information must be disclosed. Broader disclosure regimes tend to put greater trust in judicial capacity to dictate or at least review hard questions about the costs, benefits, and timing of disclosure; narrower systems leave more power in prosecutors’ hands. Technology has multiplied challenges for disclosure policy by vastly increasing evidence-gathering tactics and thus the nature and volume of information. Disclosure rules adapted fairly easily to the rise much forensic lab analysis. But fast-growing forms of digital evidence is more problematic. Defendants may lack the time to examine volumes of video and technical resources to analyze other data; sometimes prosecutors do as well. The chapter identifies some possible solutions emerging through technology and law reform, as well as trend toward greater judicial management of pre-trial disclosure.

scholarly journals The Digital Unfitness of Mutual Legal Assistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Els De Busser
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Legal Assistance ◽  
Mutual Legal Assistance ◽  
Cooperation Mechanism ◽  
The World ◽  
Evidence Gathering ◽  
Criminal Matters

Any crime could generate digital evidence. That is a reality law enforcement authorities across the world need to face. The volatile and “unterritorial” nature of the evidence means that international cooperation in criminal matters is confronted with new questions. One of these questions is whether the traditional cooperation mechanism, mutual legal assistance, is a viable way of working. Due to its time-consuming and cumbersome functioning combined with the lack of a faster alternative, countries have developed unilateral and extraterritorial methods of evidence gathering. This paper zooms in on this development and the risks it entails.

Digital Chain of Custody

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Matthew N.O. Sadiku ◽  
Adebowale E. Shadare ◽  
Sarhan M. Musa
Keyword(s):  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Chain Of Custody ◽  
Digital Investigation ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Admissible Evidence ◽  
Investigation Process

Digital chain of custody is the record of preservation of digital evidence from collection to presentation in the court of law. This is an essential part of digital investigation process.  Its key objective is to ensure that the digital evidence presented to the court remains as originally collected, without tampering. The chain of custody is important for admissible evidence in court. Without a chain of custody, the opposing attorney can challenge or dismiss the evidence presented. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the concept of digital chain custody.

scholarly journals A Mobile-Oriented System for Integrity Preserving in Audio Forensics

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 3097 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Renza ◽  
Jaime Andres Arango ◽  
Dora Maria Ballesteros
Keyword(s):  
Computational Cost ◽  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Audio Signals ◽  
Audio Forensics ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Hash Code ◽  
Chain Of Custody ◽  
Code Changes ◽  
Hash Codes

This paper addresses a problem in the field of audio forensics. With the aim of providing a solution that helps Chain of Custody (CoC) processes, we propose an integrity verification system that includes capture (mobile based), hash code calculation and cloud storage. When the audio is recorded, a hash code is generated in situ by the capture module (an application), and it is sent immediately to the cloud. Later, the integrity of the audio recording given as evidence can be verified according to the information stored in the cloud. To validate the properties of the proposed scheme, we conducted several tests to evaluate if two different inputs could generate the same hash code (collision resistance), and to evaluate how much the hash code changes when small changes occur in the input (sensitivity analysis). According to the results, all selected audio signals provide different hash codes, and these values are very sensitive to small changes over the recorded audio. On the other hand, in terms of computational cost, less than 2 s per minute of recording are required to calculate the hash code. With the above results, our system is useful to verify the integrity of audio recordings that may be relied on as digital evidence.

scholarly journals Digital Evidence Cabinets: A Proposed Framework for Handling Digital Chain of Custody

2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (9) ◽  
pp. 30-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yudi Prayudi ◽  
Ahmad Ashari ◽  
Tri K Priyambodo
Keyword(s):  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Chain Of Custody

Evidentiary Implications of Potential Security Weaknesses in Forensic Software

2011 ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Chris K. Ridder
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Electronic Evidence ◽  
Chain Of Custody ◽  
Computer Forensic

Computer forensic software is used by lawyers and law enforcement to collect and preserve data in a “forensic image” so that it can be analyzed without changing the original media, and to preserve the chain of custody of the evidence. To the extent there are vulnerabilities in this software, an attacker may be able to hide or alter the data available to a forensic analyst, causing courts to render judgments based on inaccurate or incomplete evidence. There are a number of legal doctrines designed to ensure that evidence presented to courts is authentic, accurate and reliable, but thus far courts have not applied them with the possibility of security weaknesses in forensic software in mind. This article examines how courts may react to such claims, and recommends strategies that attorneys and courts can use to ensure that electronic evidence presented in court is both admissible and fair to litigants.

scholarly journals Security Information Sharing in Smart Grids: Persisting Security Audits to the Blockchain

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1865
Author(s):  
Andrés Marín-López ◽  
Sergio Chica-Manjarrez ◽  
David Arroyo ◽  
Florina Almenares-Mendoza ◽  
Daniel Díaz-Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Information Exchange ◽  
Smart Grids ◽  
Power Grid ◽  
Inventory Systems ◽  
Data Networks ◽  
Digital Evidence ◽  
Operations Planning ◽  
Audit Result ◽  
Evidence Gathering ◽  
Security Audits

With the transformation in smart grids, power grid companies are becoming increasingly dependent on data networks. Data networks are used to transport information and commands for optimizing power grid operations: Planning, generation, transportation, and distribution. Performing periodic security audits is one of the required tasks for securing networks, and we proposed in a previous work autoauditor, a system to achieve automatic auditing. It was designed according to the specific requirements of power grid companies, such as scaling with the huge number of heterogeneous equipment in power grid companies. Though pentesting and security audits are required for continuous monitoring, collaboration is of utmost importance to fight cyber threats. In this paper we work on the accountability of audit results and explore how the list of audit result records can be included in a blockchain, since blockchains are by design resistant to data modification. Moreover, blockchains endowed with smart contracts functionality boost the automation of both digital evidence gathering, audit, and controlled information exchange. To our knowledge, no such system exists. We perform throughput evaluation to assess the feasibility of the system and show that the system is viable for adaptation to the inventory systems of electrical companies.

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