As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analyzing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional mandates, interoperability issues, the massive amount of evidence gathered (multimedia, text etc.) and multiple stakeholders involved (law enforcement agencies, security firms etc.) are just a few among the various challenges that hinder the adoption and implementation of sound digital forensics schemes. Blockchain technology has been recently proposed as a viable solution for developing robust digital forensics mechanisms. In this paper, we provide an overview and classification of the available blockchain-based digital forensic tools, and we further describe their main features. We also offer a thorough analysis of the various benefits and challenges of the symbiotic relationship between blockchain technology and the current digital forensics approaches, as proposed in the available literature. Based on the findings, we identify various research gaps, and we suggest future research directions that are expected to be of significant value both for academics and practitioners in the field of digital forensics.
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Waterford Institute of Technology（沃特福德理工学院）
Multi-year digital forensic backlogs have become commonplace in law enforcement agencies throughout the globe. Digital forensic investigators are overloaded with the volume of cases requiring their expertise compounded by the volume of data to be processed. Artificial intelligence is often seen as the solution to many big data problems. This paper summarises existing artificial intelligence based tools and approaches in digital forensics. Automated evidence processing leveraging artificial intelligence based techniques shows great promise in expediting the digital forensic analysis process whi…
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the 1970s. With the advent of the blockchain technology, front-running has resurfaced in new forms we explore here, instigated by blockchains decentralized and transparent nature. In this paper, we draw from a scattered body of knowledge and instances of front-running across the top 25 most active decentral applications (DApps) deployed on Ethereum blockchain. …
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly Blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines Blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding Blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is Blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for Bl…
Blockchain, also coined as decentralized AI, has the potential to empower AI to be more trustworthy by creating a decentralized trust of privacy, security, and audibility. However, systematic studies on the design principle of blockchain as a trust engine for an integrated society of cyber-physical-social-system (CPSS) are still absent. In this article, we provide an initiative for seeking the design principle of blockchain for a better digital world. Using a hybrid method of qualitative and quantitative studies, we examine the past origin, the current development, and the future directions of…
The underlying fundaments of blockchain are cryptography and cryptographic concepts that provide reliable and secure decentralized solutions. Although many recent papers study the use-cases of blockchain in different industrial areas, such as finance, health care, legal relations, IoT, information security, and consensus building systems, only few studies scrutinize the cryptographic concepts used in blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, there is no Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) that gives a complete picture of the existing cryptographic concepts which have been deployed or have the p…
The blockchain ecosystem has evolved into a multi-chain world with various blockchains vying for use. Although each blockchain may have its own native cryptocurrency or digital assets, there are use cases to transfer these assets between blockchains. Systems that bring these digital assets across blockchains are called bridges, and have become important parts of the ecosystem. The designs of bridges vary and range from quite primitive to extremely complex. However, they typically consist of smart contracts holding and releasing digital assets, as well as nodes that help facilitate user interac…
Blockchain systems come with a promise of decentralization that often stumbles on a roadblock when key decisions about modifying the software codebase need to be made. This is attested by the fact that both of the two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have undergone hard forks that resulted in the creation of alternative systems, creating confusion and opportunities for fraudulent activities. These events, and numerous others, underscore the importance of Blockchain governance, namely the set of processes that blockchain platforms utilize in order to perform decision-making and con…
The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitization in financial services. In this context, laws and regulations cannot efficiently cope with a fast-moving industry such as finance, which translates in late adoption of measures and legal voids, providing a fruitful landscape for malicious actors. In parallel, blockchain technology and its promising features such as immutability, verifiability, and authentication, enhance the opportunities of financial forensics. In this paper, we focus on an embezzlement scheme and we provide a forensic-by-design methodology for its investiga…
Cryptocurrency is a novel exploration of a form of currency that proposes a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on blockchain technology and cryptographic theory. While cryptocurrency has the security characteristics of being distributed and tamper-proof, increasing market demand has led to a rise in malicious transactions and attacks, thereby exposing cryptocurrency to vulnerabilities, privacy issues, and security threats. Particularly concerning are the emerging types of attacks and threats, which have made securing cryptocurrency increasingly urgent. Therefore, this paper classifi…
This document introduces XinFin DPoS 2.0, the proposed next generation decentralized consensus engine for the XinFin XDC Network. Built upon the most advanced BFT consensus protocol, this upgrade will empower the XDC Network with military-grade security and performance while consuming extremely low resources, and will be fully backwards-compatible in terms of APIs. It will also pave the road to the future evolution of the XDC Network. The core invention is the holistic integration of accountability and forensics in blockchains: the ability to identify malicious actors with cryptographic integr…
The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks emerge as a areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utili…
User transactions on Ethereum's peer-to-peer network are at risk of being attacked. The smart contracts building decentralized finance (DeFi) have introduced a new transaction ordering dependency to the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, attackers can profit from front- and back-running transactions. Multiple approaches to mitigate transaction reordering manipulations have surfaced recently. However, the success of individual approaches in mitigating such attacks and their impact on the entire blockchain remains largely unstudied. In this systematization of knowledge (SoK), we categorize and an…
Blockchain plays an important role in cryptocurrency markets and technology services. However, limitations on high latency and low scalability retard their adoptions and applications in classic designs. Reconstructed blockchain systems have been proposed to avoid the consumption of competitive transactions caused by linear sequenced blocks. These systems, instead, structure transactions/blocks in the form of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and consequently re-build upper layer components including consensus, incentives, \textit{etc.} The promise of DAG-based blockchain systems is to enable fast c…
One of the main issues in digital forensics is the management of evidences. From the time of evidence collection until the time of their exploitation in a legal court, evidences may be accessed by multiple parties involved in the investigation that take temporary their ownership. This process, called Chain of Custody (CoC), must ensure that evidences are not altered during the investigation, despite multiple entities owned them, in order to be admissible in a legal court. Currently digital evidences CoC is managed entirely manually with entities involved in the chain required to fill in docume…
One fundamental limitation of blockchain-based smart contracts is that they execute in a closed environment. Thus, they only have access to data and functionality that is already on the blockchain, or is fed into the blockchain. Any interactions with the real world need to be mediated by a bridge service, which is called an oracle. As decentralized applications mature, oracles are playing an increasingly prominent role. With their evolution comes more attacks, necessitating greater attention to their trust model. In this systemization of knowledge paper (SoK), we dissect the design alternative…
In this era of explosive growth in technology, the internet of things (IoT) has become the game changer when we consider technologies like smart homes and cities, smart energy, security and surveillance, and healthcare. The numerous benefits provided by IoT have become attractive technologies for users and cybercriminals. Cybercriminals of today have the tools and the technology to deploy millions of sophisticated attacks. These attacks need to be investigated; this is where digital forensics comes into play. However, it is not easy to conduct a forensic investigation in IoT systems because of…
Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that do not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is the forensic analysis for traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrume…
Play-to-earn is one of the prospective categories of decentralized applications. The play-to-earn projects combine blockchain technology with entertaining games and finance, attracting various participants. While huge amounts of capital have been poured into these projects, the new crypto niche is considered controversial, and the traditional gaming industry is hesitant to embrace blockchain technology. In addition, there is little systematic research on these projects. In this paper, we delineate play-to-earn projects in terms of economic & governance models and implementation and analyze how…
IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incid…
Emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency-based technologies are redefining the way we conduct business in cyberspace. Today, a myriad of blockchain and cryptocurrency systems, applications, and technologies are widely available to companies, end-users, and even malicious actors who want to exploit the computational resources of regular users through \textit{cryptojacking} malware. Especially with ready-to-use mining scripts easily provided by service providers (e.g., Coinhive) and untraceable cryptocurrencies (e.g., Monero), cryptojacking malware has become an indispensable tool for attackers. I…
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
In shaping the Internet of Money, the application of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to the financial sector triggered regulatory concerns. Notably, while the user anonymity enabled in this field may safeguard privacy and data protection, the lack of identifiability hinders accountability and challenges the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism and proliferation (AML/CFT). As law enforcement agencies and the private sector apply forensics to track crypto transfers across ecosystems that are socio-technical in nature, this paper focuses on the growi…
How Reliable Is the Multi-Input Heuristic for Bitcoin Address Clustering in Law Enforcement Contexts?
University of Bayreuth（拜罗伊特大学）；Iknaio Cryptoasset Analytics（Iknaio 加密资产分析）；Complexity Science Hub（复杂性科学中心）；Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime（巴伐利亚网络犯罪起诉中央办公室）
