Publication

Abstract : pIn today’s world of ever growing cyber space, thousands of cybercrimes of any kind are committed in every other second. Thanks to the huge volume of digital data, it is too tedious to identify the cause of a crime. Digital forensics tries to address this by investigating the evidences recovered from the crime scene. For a digital evidence to be valid in the court of law, its integrity and confidentiality must be ensured. After a crime is committed, it takes a lot of time to submit the evidence in the court of law. Meanwhile, in case by any chance, if the evidence gets tampered even if inadvertently, then the evidence, even if it is of prime importance, gets rejected due to integrity issue after comparing the hashes - taken as soon as the evidence discovery and the day of submission to the court. Thus, the evidences are imaged for investigation to maintain its integrity. In this paper, we propose the method of piecewise hashing, which assures integrity of the evidence and DEIC to offer confidentiality. Unlike traditional hashing, where whole of the evidence is subjected to hashing, Piecewise hashing is a method in which the evidence file is split into either fixed volume pieces or flexible volume pieces using dd commands and thereby individually hashed using dcfldd command. The digital certificate ensures confidentiality of the evidence by granting its access only when the private key is presented. © 2018 Academic Press. All Rights Reserved./p