Development of Secure Electronic Cybercrime Cases Database System for the Judiciary

Abstract

The recent covid-19 pandemic created a barrier to every activity that needed physical interaction and involvement, especially in the judiciary. Careful research of some courts in Nigeria shown that case records are still been manually processed and stored and some courts operate a semi-digital and semi-manual processing pattern, which also has its own shortcoming of preprocessing manual records and converting them into digital records and physical presence is required to access court records. This research develops a secure electronic Cybercrime Cases Database System (eCCDBS), for prosecuted cybercrime in the judicial service in Nigeria. The system will provide an efficient method for collecting, retrieving, preserving, and management of court case records. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology is used for the system development, because of its speed and time friendliness and can be easily restructured to meet the client's requirement at any point in time during the development life span. RAD can also present a prototype of the final system software to the client. Access control mechanism and secure password hashing were used to ensure the security of the system. The system was implemented and evaluated through deployment and found to have functioned according to the specification. The application subunits of records' creation, submission, modification, deletion, retrieval, and storage functioned effectively. Hence this system provides a secure online repository specifically for cybercrime case records that have elements of confidentiality, integrity and availability.