Public trust in the government’s handling of court cases depends in a large part on trust in the integrity of evidence maintained by government agencies. When the integrity of such evidence cannot be proven, such a situation fosters distrust in the government, and thus undermines our democracy. A system that could ensure the integrity of legal evidence (such as documents, images, and video), verifiable by anyone, could improve this situation.
RecordsKeeper [1] is a system to implement data security and records keeping using blockchain technology. It supports deploying RecordsKeeper on internal infrastructure as a local blockchain, as opposed to an application running on top of a public blockchain like Ethereum [2]. It provides data integrity and verifiability, but does not provide evidence-specific features, such as differential authorization for different people/groups.
MedRec [3] is a system for storing medical records on the blockchain, designed and implemented by researchers at MIT. However, MedRec does not address security of individual databases, nor does the initial prototype contain encryption of the contracts. As well, MedRec does not address the transaction volume problem and how to appropriately scale.
We propose to build an application on top of the Ethereum blockchain that will store, serve, and verify the integrity of legal records - such as evidence - for the public record. The blockchain will be used for integrity verification of records. An application layer on top of the blockchain will be used for permission management and security. Storage of the court records will happen on an off-blockchain storage service to ensure security and remove the need for the blockchain to store every file.
Our solution will improve on existing solutions by combining integrity, authorization, authentication, storage, security, and legal record- and evidence-specific considerations into a single product.
There are many challenges to overcome with using Blockchain technology. For instance, current Blockchain implementations do not have encryption built in. Furthermore, we will have to research current data sharing laws, and potentially address such laws.
We plan to implement a baseline demonstration of the described system over the course of the semester.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Proposal | Jan 31,2018 |
| Design Document/Project Outline | Feb 10, 2018 |
| Project Website | Feb 15, 2018 |
| Basic Dapp Object Verification | Feb 18, 2018 |
| Dapp Front End | Feb 25, 2018 |
| Midterm Presentation | Feb 26, 2018 |
| Dapp Back End | March 10, 2018 |
| Application Testing | March 20, 2018 |
| Final Presentation/Demo | April 6, 2018 |
[1] https://recordskeeper.co/#
[2] https://www.ethereum.org/
[3] https://viral.pubpub.org/pub/medrec
| Activity | Date |
|---|---|
| Proposal Submitted | Jan 31,2018 |
| Design Document/Project Outline Submitted | Feb 10, 2018 |
| Initial project Website Created | Feb 15, 2018 |
| Technology research completed | Feb 27, 2018 |
| Design research completed | March 1, 2018 |
| Architecture plan completed | March 2, 2018 |
| Website upated with work log | March 2, 2018 |
| Started web app implementation | March 8, 2018 |
| Add user and document management to web app | March 14, 2018 |
| Integrate placeholder dApp into the web app | March 14, 2018 |
| Implement hash storage smart contract | March 15, 2018 |
| Add permission management to web app | March 15, 2018 |
| Add basic authentication to web app | March 16, 2018 |
| Add document file uploading to web app | March 19, 2018 |
| Improve sign up/sign in flow in web app | March 19, 2018 |
| Improve permissions | March 20, 2018 |
| Implement front end to store and retrieve hashes in blockchain contracts from JavaScript client | March 21, 2018 |
| Hash documents and store hashes in contracts | March 23, 2018 |
The team behind Integrichain
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