A Preservation Metamodel Based on Blockchain Technology for Preserving Mobile Evidence

Mobile devices can be used to gather evidence of mobile crimes, which is crucial for proving these crimes. The protection and preservation of digital evidence originating from mobile devices is a top priority for investigators. The investigation task will become much more complicated if this evidence is lost or tampered with during the investigation process. Several traditional preservation mechanisms have been proposed to preserve the integrity of the mobile evidence from being tampered with or altered in any way. However, these mechanisms are specific and not sufficient to maintain mobile evidence integrity reliably. Accordingly, the motivation of this study is to analyze mobile devices from the preservation evidence perspective, and then develop a preservation metamodel for preserving mobile evidence using blockchain technology. The scope of this study covers the development of a complete preservation metamodel using metamodeling approach based on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is a secure and immutable protocol that offers a consistent and transparent way for storing and accessing mobile evidence in a secure and immutable manner. The meta-modeling approach was used to construct the preservation metamodel in this paper. The results showed that the developed preservation meta-model can instantiate/derive several solution models for preservation purposes. The model was found to be more comprehensive than any of the existing models proposed in the field of mobile forensics. It additionally provides a semantic metamodeling language, which could be used by domain practitioners to create several kinds of specific models based on their needs.