Safekeeping Digital Evidence with Secure Logging Protocols: State of the Art and Challenges

While log data are being increasingly used as digital evidence in court, the extent which existing secure logging protocols used to collect log data fulfill the legal requirements for admissible evidence remain largely unclear. This paper elucidates a subset of the necessary secure requirements for digital evidence and extensively surveys the state of the art secure logging protocols, thereby demonstrating that none of the current protocols completely fulfills the elucidated requirements for admissible evidence. In analyzing the shortcoming of logging protocols, the paper also elaborates on the related research challenges.