research-article

Anonymous, Secure, Traceable, and Efficient Decentralized Digital Forensics

Authors:

Mauro ContiAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Volume 36, Issue 5

Pages 1874 - 1888

https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3321712

Published: 01 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Digital forensics is crucial to fight crimes around the world. Decentralized Digital Forensics (DDF) promotes it to another level by channeling the power of blockchain into digital investigations. In this work, we focus on the privacy and security of DDF. Our motivations arise from (1) how to track an anonymous-and-malicious data user who leaks only a part of the previously requested data, (2) how to achieve access control while protecting data from untrusted data centers, and (3) how to enable efficient and secure search on the blockchain. To address these issues, we propose Themis: an anonymous and secure DDF scheme with traceable anonymity, private access control, and efficient search. Our framework is boosted by establishing a Trusted Execution Environment in each authority (blockchain node) for securing the uploading, requesting, and searching. To instantiate the framework, we design a secure and robust watermarking scheme in conjunction with decentralized anonymous authentication, a private and fine-grained access control scheme, and an efficient and secure search scheme based on a dynamically updated data structure. We formally define and prove the privacy and security of Themis. We build a prototype with Ethereum and Intel SGX2 to evaluate its performance, which supports processing data from a considerable number of data providers and investigators.

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Cited By

Hu QHuang CZhang GCai LJiang T(2024)Towards accountable and privacy-preserving blockchain-based access control for data sharingJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10386685:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jisa.2024.103866

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cover image IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering Volume 36, Issue 5

May 2024

458 pages

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1041-4347 © 2023 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

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Published: 01 May 2024

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Cited By

Hu QHuang CZhang GCai LJiang T(2024)Towards accountable and privacy-preserving blockchain-based access control for data sharingJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10386685:COnline publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jisa.2024.103866

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