Blockchain-Based Tamper-Evident Chain of Custody for Criminal Evidence: A Proposed Framework for Bangladesh
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68307/s0h1tf15Keywords:
Blockchain, Cybersecurity, Steganography, Cryptography, Data Hiding, Information Security, Smart Cities, Evudence, criminal, tamper evidenceAbstract
Criminal justice systems depend on an unbroken, verifiable chain of custody (CoC) to prove that evidence presented in court is the same evidence collected at the crime scene, unaltered and unsubstituted. In Bangladesh, custody records remain largely paper-based, tracked through police malkhana (property room) ledgers vulnerable to loss, forgery, and unrecorded handling, with no unified mechanism linking crime-scene seizure, forensic analysis, and courtroom production. This paper proposes a permissioned blockchain framework binding physical exhibits to tamper-evident tagged containers and digital exhibits to content-addressed hashes, recording every custody transfer as an immutable, multi-signed ledger transaction. The framework defines five stakeholder roles, a seven-state custody lifecycle enforced by chaincode, and a governance model in which Bangladesh Police, the Police Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Investigation Department, and the judiciary each operate a validating node, preventing unilateral alteration of custody records. The design is evaluated qualitatively against eight existing blockchain chain-of-custody proposals, none of which jointly address physical-evidence tagging, offline-first operation, and alignment with Bangladesh evidentiary statutes. A narcotics-seizure scenario illustrates the workflow, and a threat model examines insider tampering, key loss, and collusion resistance. The paper concludes with implementation challenges and a phased adoption roadmap.
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