A Privacy Preserving Method for IoT Forensics

The diversity of the Internet of Things (IoT) poses challenges to privacy protection, especially in the field of digital forensics. How to ensure that only the private information of the suspect is provided, and not the irrelevant information of other users is disclosed is crucial, especially when obtaining evidence in the complex IoT environment. To the best of our knowledge, there are few studies on protecting the privacy of irrelevant users in the IoT forensics. However, it is very important to ensure that the evidence does not violate the privacy of other users when collecting evidence, because it directly determines whether the evidence is legal and whether it can be admissible in court. In this paper, a new method based on data provenance graph is designed to solve the privacy protection problem of IoT forensics. The key idea of this method is to protect privacy by dividing multi-user information and protecting it from an encryption perspective. The method consists of three main phrases: distinguishing different users' data provenance graphs using traversal search, node abstraction, and hiding techniques, utilizing pseudo-random dual-key negotiation methods tailored for the scenario to enhance privacy protection for unrelated users, and employing identity authentication technology to facilitate better investigation and extraction of data provenance graph information of criminal accomplices in specific scenarios. Example proves that this method has practical significance and promising application prospects in protecting the privacy of unrelated users in IoT forensics while ensuring evidence accessibility in special criminal scenarios.