The success of the project mainly depends on the use that the agents involved in the forensic field give to the platform and the degree of recognition that the courts of law grant to the presented evidence. Both the standard and the developed platform consider the real needs of stakeholders.
The core of the project is a comprehensive chain of custody platform based on blockchain with smart contracts to allow the seamless interaction of all stakeholders and the recording of all digital evidence and action on it. This allows for the creation of an immutable yet flexible and transparent storage for digital evidence which enables all the involved entities from the private sector, LEAs, prosecutors, etc. to manage the digital evidence but also exchanges them in a cross-jurisdiction case. Moreover, it allows the identification of correlations, e.g. a piece of evidence is found in two different cases. Finally, a set of dedicated tools have been created to provide investigators with advanced capabilities for streaming, mobile, and network forensics.
With the aim to ensure high-quality results and maximise the project’s impact, the consortium built a network from an interdisciplinary community of stakeholders, encompassing technology providers, public bodies, consumers and concerned citizens from the private, public, research and third sectors across Europe, interested in the results of the project, as well as in the use of the platform developed by the LOCARD project. The stakeholders were requested to get involved (always voluntarily and without any obligation on their part) in the following activities: Follow the evolution of the project by reading the materials and deliverables; provide feedback, based on their expertise, on the development of the platform; contribute to the dissemination of LOCARD’s results and; participate in the public activities organised by LOCARD.
From a dissemination perspective, to make the findings of the LOCARD project known as widely as feasible, especially among researchers, stakeholders and the general public, the project has been presented in several events such as workshops and symposiums, besides several webinars to keep the community informed. All the information is available on the Project website:
https://locard.eu/news-events/events(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). Moreover, scientific publications (in prestigious conferences and journals) have been published and are available in the LOCARD’s website section:
https://locard.eu/outcomes/project-publications(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). In fact, the research outcomes have been published in more than 90 venues, most of which Q1 and Q2 journals, receiving more than 1200 citations at the time of writing. The research contributions cover topics such as mobile forensics, cloud forensics, trusted computing environments, streaming services forensics, identity access management, blockchain systems, and deviant behaviour in social networks, to name a few. Moreover, most developed tools are open source and have been integrated into the LOCARD’s toolkit.
Dissemination materials such as brochures, posters and presentations are also available in the Project website:
https://locard.eu/outcomes/communication-tools(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).
