In recent times, various forms of crime have been happening worldwide. The law-and-order department of any country officially records a crime in electronic forms or on paper when the crime is reported by a victim or someone on behalf of the victim. The document that is prepared to file any perceptible committed crimes including dowry, kidnap, murder, rape, theft, and others is called First Information Report(FIR). Nowadays, online FIR also known as e-FIR has been used worldwide. Every day a number of e-FIR are filed, and they are maintained in a centralized database with the aid of third-party trust. Consequently, malicious entities including insiders and outsiders’ dishonest personnel, and third-party authorities may tamper with e-FIR that questions the transparency and integrity of FIR reports. To address this exposure, in this paper, we propose a blockchain based FIR system to store all kinds of offense-related records to assure security, fidelity and privacy of FIR records. In this proposed system, the blockchain technology that refers to a decentralized and distributed ledger across peer-to-peer networks continually updates the shared ledger and strictly maintains synchronization among all network nodes. Though blockchain technology guarantees tamper-proof of the data, it cannot store a large amount of data due to the replication of ledger among all network nodes. To solve this issue, we adopt the Inter-Planetary File system (IPFS) protocol to store data in the blockchain. IPFS is a distributed file-sharing system that can be leveraged to store and share large files. The blockchain based FIR system has been tested on an Ethereum environment using blockchain and IPFS technology.

With the advancement in digital forensics, digital forensics has been evolved in Cloud computing. A common process of digital forensics mainly includes five steps: defining problem scenario, collection of the related data, investigation of the crime scenes, analysis of evidences and case documentation. The conduction of digital forensics in cloud results in several challenges, security, and privacy issues. In this paper, several digital forensics approaches in the context of IoT and cloud have been presented. The review focused on zone-based approach for IoT digital forensics where the forensics process is divided into three zones. Digital forensics in cloud provides the facilities of large data storage, computational capabilities and identification of criminal activities required for investigating forensics. We have presented a brief study on several issues and challenges raised in each phase of Cloud forensics process. The solution approaches as well as advancement prospects of cloud forensics have been described in the light of Blockchain technology. These studies will broaden the way to new researchers for better understanding and devising new ideas for combating the challenges.