Digital Chain of Custody For Cbrne Events: Custody Transfer Governance

The specification of standardised processes with information related to the custody of digital evidence related to CBRNE events is a crucial issue today. The integrity of the evidence must be maintained from when before it was first discovered until when it is later submitted to a court. This means that to maintain the chain of custody is crucial to follow standardised procedures to ensure data quality. Each link (or step) in the chain (or process) is essential to assure the legitimacy, integrity, and examination rendered upon the collected CBRNE sample. The paper steers the digital evidence inspection process by stipulating that each piece of evidence should be considered from the perspective of its source, creator, time, location, and reason. This means that as long as one of the intervenient actors keeps the digital evidence, a digital chain of custody (dCoC) will be established. The guidelines provided for the dCoC workflow are intended to establish basic practices that participants in forensic operations should follow as part of standard operating procedures for effective and reliable audits of custody transfers.