A blockchain-based digital evidence management system: Integrating forensic procedures and multi-party authorization

초록

Current blockchain-based digital evidence systems provide strong technical integrity but fail to adequately address the procedural legitimacy required for court admissibility, frequently omitting judicial authorization workflows, differentiated handling of voluntary versus compulsory evidence, and transparent destruction protocols. To address these gaps, we propose B-DEMS, a blockchain-based digital evidence management system that integrates the full evidence lifecycle-from registration to court-authorized destruction-while encoding jurisdiction-specific legal requirements across South Korea, the United States, the European Union, and China. B-DEMS implements multi-party authorization, conditional decryption, and transaction-based disposal to ensure auditability and procedural compliance. Experimental evaluation across 1950 workflow executions demonstrated that B-DEMS achieved a maximum throughput of 10,890 TPS, representing 51-219% improvement over state-of-the-art systems, while maintaining stable scalability with latency increasing only 2.7-fold under a 5-fold peer expansion. Security analysis confirmed a 0% attack success rate across 300 adversarial attempts, and cross-border cooperation scenarios exhibited consistent adherence to jurisdiction-specific approval workflows. By aligning evidentiary procedures with a scalable blockchain architecture, B-DEMS provides a technically robust and procedurally compliant foundation for practical deployment in multi-agency and international investigative environments.

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