Abstract

Background/Objectives: The rapid expansion of digital evidence in modern investigations has created pressing challenges for maintaining integrity, traceability, chain of custody, and meaningful analysis across heterogeneous forensic artefacts. Conventional evidence management approaches often fall short in scalability, transparency, and the ability to correlate diverse digital evidence. This study presents BlockFECS, a blockchain-based proof-of-concept system for metadata-driven evidence correlation in digital forensics. Methods: BlockFECS uses Hyperledger Fabric to support auditable and tamper-resistant evidence management while capturing structured forensic metadata, including timestamps, locations, device IDs, user IDs, and file hashes. An off-chain weighted correlation algorithm assigns similarity scores between evidence pairs and classifies relationships as Related, Supplementary, Duplicate, or Unrelated. The system was evaluated using a simulated smart city accident scenario and tested for correctness, transaction latency, throughput, scalability trends, and concurrency behaviour across four computing environments. Results: Within the controlled proof-of-concept dataset, the correlation algorithm achieved 1.00 precision and recall for clear Related and Duplicate evidence relationships and high precision (0.90) for Supplementary relationships, although recall in this category was lower due to incomplete or noisy metadata. Performance testing showed that Create, Transfer, and Delete operations completed with sub-second latency, while correlation throughput exceeded 60 comparisons per second across all tested environments. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate the feasibility of combining blockchain-backed evidence integrity with lightweight metadata-driven forensic intelligence. BlockFECS contributes a proof-of-concept model for automating metadata-based evidence analysis while preserving provenance integrity and auditability, highlighting a promising direction for trustworthy and intelligent digital forensic investigation support.

IPC Classification

Keywords