Proper digital forensic evidence must be authentic and have its integrity intact to be used in a court of law. Conventionally, such assurance is established when a forensic specialist secures the potential evidence and is maintained from that point. This leaves a significant window when this potential evidence data can be tampered with by both intentional malicious attacks and unintentional modifications, making the potential evidence unavailable or misleading. Reducing the exposure window enables so-called forensic-ready software to provide high levels of assurance over its data vital for possible forensic investigation.

The objective of this master's thesis is to develop a method to proactively secure the potential evidence data, minimising the exposure window by establishing the data's authenticity and integrity as early as possible. Here, the student should consider the weaknesses of distributed solutions to store and protect the potential evidence (e.g., blockchain, threshold cryptography). Furthermore, the solution should allow an independent third party to re-examine the potential evidence data. Lastly, the performance of the presented solution shall be analysed for the feasibility of its usage by experimentally demonstrating the average size of an exposure window.