A Cryptographic Tamper Detection Approach for Storage and Preservation of Forensic Digital Data Based on SHA 384 Hash Function

Abstract

The current age permits for legal, official, sensitive, and confidential documents to be exchanged using digital channels among stakeholders. In this digital age, new advances in technology are tremendously vital creating more sophisticated and intelligent tools in areas like informatics, electronics, and telecommunication. In the wake of these new advances, any individual can digitize any kind of document, and modern computing tools can alter all these using computational drawing tools, such as GIMP or Paint Shop Pro, without causing any distortions hence, tampered documents can be presented with the same quality as the original documents. Documents tampered, when used or distributed illegally can cause economic, political, legal and moral damages to individuals and organizations. In this paper, we propose to detect the tampering of documents using SHA-384 hash function..