1. Challenges of Digital Evidence
With the rapid advancement of internet technology, crimes are no longer confined to the physical world. Digital evidence existing in the virtual world lacks the tangible nature of traditional physical evidence. Unlike physical evidence, which can be securely stored and monitored in physical spaces, digital evidence is vulnerable to unauthorized access, external intrusions, unauthorized copying, modifications, or even deletions during acquisition or transfer processes. Such vulnerabilities can compromise the evidentiary integrity of digital files.
2. Blockchain-Enhanced Digital Evidence
Blockchain, based on a decentralized distributed ledger, offers key features that address many concerns related to digital evidence. Drawing from extensive collaboration with judicial institutions, our company has gained deep insights into the advantages and applications of blockchain for digital evidence preservation:
1. Decentralization – Digital evidence is stored in a distributed manner across multiple independent nodes, eliminating the risk of loss. This system operates without the need for centralized management and utilizes algorithms to synchronize data across nodes, ensuring the security and availability of stored digital evidence.
2. Immutability – Once a digital evidence fingerprint is recorded on the blockchain, it cannot be altered and is permanently stored. Blockchain records can be publicly verified using cryptographic algorithms, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of digital evidence.
3. Public Chain Anchoring – To address concerns that private or consortium blockchains may still have centralized elements, we anchor batches of digital evidence data to a public blockchain. This provides a verifiable timestamp sequence, ensuring that any discrepancies with previous blockchain records indicate possible data tampering.
3. Applications of Digital Evidence
Our company has successfully applied blockchain technology to both judicial and commercial applications. This includes assisting Taiwan’s judicial institutions in building the "Judicial Alliance Chain" and offering the "Blockchain Sign" service for general users. These solutions enable electronic evidence and contract documentation to be stored on a permissioned consortium blockchain, with cross-chain anchoring to a public blockchain. These implementations showcase the powerful benefits of blockchain for evidence preservation.
