Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled wireless surveillance systems are gaining more attention because of the robust development in information technology. It is due to the versatile distributed application features and improved performance of the technology, which required proper investigation. In a multimedia environment, video captured by surveillance cameras is required to be stored (uploaded) for secure preservation for the sake of futuristics analysis, especially in multimedia forensics investigation processes. While storing large raw video files over the network and extracting features as per needs, the systems' provenance with the ledger integrity, reliability, transparency, availability, immutability, and trustworthiness are the main concerns. These highlighted challenges pose a serious issue in the domain of network transmissions, where digital forensics investigation is applied. In addition, the limited use of multimedia resource constraints over the wireless network, such as computational power, network bandwidth, and storage created another type of challenging aspect throughout the investigation. However, the current lifecycle is observing the most critical in terms of consecutive duplicated video frame creation. There is a need to handle a few objects of interest, filter the frames, and investigate them before storing them on the secure digital ledger, which also relieves the pressure of network transmission at the same time. The real-time monitoring of the blind area (which is covered with dark shadows) of the video also affects the frame filtering accuracy. This impacts the forensics investigation hierarchy, investigational data management, and multimedia-enabled chain-of-custody preservation. To address such challenging issues, this paper bridges these gaps by enabling novel and secure digital forensics investigation processes using IoT-Blockchain-based collaborative technology. A blockchain hyperledger sawtooth-enabled secure and efficient digital multimedia forensics investigational distributed architecture is proposed. The process connects participating stakeholders to exchange details of the investigation, including the video surveillance pre-processed frame filtering-related chain-of-custody details by creating a private network. And so, customized consensus protocols such as proof-of-work sawtooth policies. To design and deploy such protocols, the system enables the analysis of the overall activities of scheduled multimedia transmission before preserving them on the distributed ledger. For automation, smart contracts are implemented to automate ledger redundancy verification and validation, requesting for contents of video surveillance frame filtering and maintaining immutable preservation. Substantially, it provides a secure interaction between the investigational processes because of lifecycle tuning. Through experimental results, the proposed solution provides better performance with robust capability to track and trace real-time video surveillance, frame auto-filtering redundancy, and object-of-interest investigation with an increased efficiency rate of 30% and reduces resource consumption down to 11.56%.
