Securing forensic records with real-time crypto image camera, authentication, and cloud cryptoserver

The rapid expansion of digital forensics and cloud-based evidence management has introduced new challenges in preserving the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of sensitive forensic records. These challenges intensify when evidence is captured using IoT-enabled imaging devices and transmitted across untrusted networks. To address this problem, this paper presents a secure and practical forensic record management framework that integrates a Real-time Crypto Image Camera with a cloud-based Cryptoserver. The proposed system ensures end-to-end protection of forensic images by combining image-dependent chaos-based encryption, SHA-256 hashing, and AES-128 symmetric cryptography, offering strong confidentiality while remaining lightweight enough for resource-constrained edge devices such as the Raspberry Pi 4. A dynamic, image-derived key generation mechanism enhances security against dictionary, rainbow-table, and chosen-plaintext attacks, while an Abstract Data Table (ADT) with hashed credentials ensures protected authentication and controlled access. Experimental evaluation conducted on benchmark and real-time forensic images demonstrates high entropy ( \({≈ } {7.99}\) ), strong diffusion properties (NPCR > 99.6 %), and uniform pixel change rates (UACI \({≈ } {33.4 %)}\) ), confirming the superior randomness and resilience of the proposed scheme compared with recent chaos-based methods. Real-time deployment achieved an average encryption latency of 0.38 s for \({512} {× } {512}\) images on Raspberry Pi 4, validating its suitability for live forensic operations. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution for secure forensic data acquisition, storage, and transmission, enhancing both investigative reliability and operational security.