Leveraging Polygon Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Secure Electronic Evidence Storage in Court: A Novel Framework
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Abstract
The increasing digitization of modern society has led to a growing volume of digital information---such as emails, photos, videos, and electronic records---being presented as evidence in legal proceedings. However, traditional storage systems are costly, slow, and prone to server failures. To address these challenges, we propose a system leveraging blockchain and IPFS to store electronic evidence securely and reliably. Existing Layer 1 blockchain-based systems face three key limitations: (1) scalability issues with slow throughput and high costs under heavy traffic; (2) privacy risks due to public visibility of transaction data; and (3) impracticality of on-chain storage for large evidentiary files. Our system utilizes Polygon, a faster and more cost-effective Layer 2 blockchain, combined with IPFS for off-chain storage of documents, images, and videos. Each file is assigned a cryptographic hash stored on-chain to ensure integrity and tamper resistance. Smart contracts enforce role-based access control, restricting actions to authorized participants such as police officers, lawyers, and judges. Experimental evaluation with 10,000 transactions achieved approximately 14.29 TPS on modest hardware, with the potential for significantly higher throughput in optimized environments. This demonstrates the system's viability for both high-volume urban courts and resource-constrained rural settings. Overall, the proposed solution offers enhanced security, controlled access, reduced storage costs, and improved efficiency for digital evidence management in judicial systems.
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References
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Cite This Article
TY - JOUR AU - Behera, Sarbeswar AU - Arya, Suraj PY - 2026 DA - 2026/08/27 TI - Leveraging Polygon Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Secure Electronic Evidence Storage in Court: A Novel Framework JO - ICCK Journal of Software Engineering T2 - ICCK Journal of Software Engineering JF - ICCK Journal of Software Engineering VL - 2 IS - 3 SP - 197 EP - 219 DO - 10.62762/JSE.2026.766488 UR - https://www.icck.org/article/abs/JSE.2026.766488 KW - blockchain KW - electronic evidence management KW - smart contracts KW - IPFS KW - polygon CDK KW - zkEVM KW - access control KW - decentralized storage KW - transaction per second AB - The increasing digitization of modern society has led to a growing volume of digital information---such as emails, photos, videos, and electronic records---being presented as evidence in legal proceedings. However, traditional storage systems are costly, slow, and prone to server failures. To address these challenges, we propose a system leveraging blockchain and IPFS to store electronic evidence securely and reliably. Existing Layer 1 blockchain-based systems face three key limitations: (1) scalability issues with slow throughput and high costs under heavy traffic; (2) privacy risks due to public visibility of transaction data; and (3) impracticality of on-chain storage for large evidentiary files. Our system utilizes Polygon, a faster and more cost-effective Layer 2 blockchain, combined with IPFS for off-chain storage of documents, images, and videos. Each file is assigned a cryptographic hash stored on-chain to ensure integrity and tamper resistance. Smart contracts enforce role-based access control, restricting actions to authorized participants such as police officers, lawyers, and judges. Experimental evaluation with 10,000 transactions achieved approximately 14.29 TPS on modest hardware, with the potential for significantly higher throughput in optimized environments. This demonstrates the system's viability for both high-volume urban courts and resource-constrained rural settings. Overall, the proposed solution offers enhanced security, controlled access, reduced storage costs, and improved efficiency for digital evidence management in judicial systems. SN - 3069-1834 PB - Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge LA - English ER -
@article{Behera2026Leveraging,
author = {Sarbeswar Behera and Suraj Arya},
title = {Leveraging Polygon Blockchain and Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Secure Electronic Evidence Storage in Court: A Novel Framework},
journal = {ICCK Journal of Software Engineering},
year = {2026},
volume = {2},
number = {3},
pages = {197-219},
doi = {10.62762/JSE.2026.766488},
url = {https://www.icck.org/article/abs/JSE.2026.766488},
abstract = {The increasing digitization of modern society has led to a growing volume of digital information---such as emails, photos, videos, and electronic records---being presented as evidence in legal proceedings. However, traditional storage systems are costly, slow, and prone to server failures. To address these challenges, we propose a system leveraging blockchain and IPFS to store electronic evidence securely and reliably. Existing Layer 1 blockchain-based systems face three key limitations: (1) scalability issues with slow throughput and high costs under heavy traffic; (2) privacy risks due to public visibility of transaction data; and (3) impracticality of on-chain storage for large evidentiary files. Our system utilizes Polygon, a faster and more cost-effective Layer 2 blockchain, combined with IPFS for off-chain storage of documents, images, and videos. Each file is assigned a cryptographic hash stored on-chain to ensure integrity and tamper resistance. Smart contracts enforce role-based access control, restricting actions to authorized participants such as police officers, lawyers, and judges. Experimental evaluation with 10,000 transactions achieved approximately 14.29 TPS on modest hardware, with the potential for significantly higher throughput in optimized environments. This demonstrates the system's viability for both high-volume urban courts and resource-constrained rural settings. Overall, the proposed solution offers enhanced security, controlled access, reduced storage costs, and improved efficiency for digital evidence management in judicial systems.},
keywords = {blockchain, electronic evidence management, smart contracts, IPFS, polygon CDK, zkEVM, access control, decentralized storage, transaction per second},
issn = {3069-1834},
publisher = {Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge}
}
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Copyright © 2026 by the Author(s). Published by Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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