Decentralized AI-Powered Legal Evidence Repository (DALER) for Tamper-Proof Court Evidence

Abstract

Ensure justice and the integrity of the legal evidence, but the traditional ways of storing digital evidence leave a lot to be desired as they are subject to tampering, unauthorized modification, and battle over authenticity. Centralized conventional repositories are at risk of data breaches, loss of records of chain of custody, and susceptibility to forgery, and cannot be trusted for high stake judicial applications. Inefficient, monopolistic, and prone to errors, as there is no automated, verifiable, and inaccessible system to process legal evidence.

This paper introduces Decentralized AI Powered Legal Evidence Repository (DALER), a cloud storage solution with blockchain integration fortified with artificial intelligence for authenticating real-time evidence. Through blockchain’s decentralized ledger, DALER is an immutability feature because the cryptographic hashing is applied to metadata, and the AI algorithms verify the authenticity of the digital evidence, uncovering deepfakes and document tampering. The chain of custody protocol is enforced by smart contracts to be legally compliant, and role-based access control is provided to provide judicial and data privacy compliance. It also pairs InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to use it for scalable distributed storage, saving a single point of failure. Experimental results are conducted to show that DALER can improve the security of legal evidence, speed up judicial efficiency, and enhance a court’s accountability. The combination of AI with blockchain could revolutionize the legal domain, as this research shows the potential it has to offer to provide trustworthy as well as tamper proof evidence management.