Overview#
A forensic analyst enhances a surveillance image to identify a suspect's face. A disclosure coordinator redacts personal identifiers from a document before sending it to defence counsel. An investigator adds a time-reference annotation to a video clip. Each of these creates a new version of an evidence item. In legal proceedings, the question of what changed, when, and by whose hand is not merely procedural: it can determine whether the evidence is admitted, whether an expert's conclusions are credible, and whether the original material remains available for independent verification.
The Evidence Versioning System tracks every modification, annotation, and metadata change against each evidence item, maintains the complete version history with cryptographic verification, and keeps the original file intact regardless of how many derivative versions are created. Version comparison, rollback, branching for parallel analysis streams, and merging are all supported. Forensic analysts, disclosure coordinators, legal teams, and court-appointed experts across criminal investigation units and financial regulatory bodies rely on this record to demonstrate that evidence has been handled transparently and that the original is always recoverable.
Key Features#
- Unlimited version history with complete change tracking for every evidence modification, annotation, and metadata update
- Fast version operations for creation, retrieval, and comparison, keeping the workflow responsive even on items with long version histories
- Cryptographic verification applied to every version, confirming that each snapshot in the history is unaltered from when it was created
- Version comparison tools identifying specific changes between any two versions, supporting expert witness testimony on what was modified and when
- Rollback capability to restore evidence to any previous version when modifications need to be reversed, with the rollback itself recorded in the audit trail
- Branching and merging support for parallel evidence analysis workflows, allowing multiple analysts to work independently on the same item and reconcile their work when ready
- Annotation and metadata change tracking with full actor attribution, so every note, tag, and field edit is traceable to the individual who made it
- Complete audit trail for all versioning operations, meeting the documentation standards required for court proceedings and regulatory inspection
Use Cases#
- Tracking all modifications to evidence with a complete, cryptographically verified version history for use in legal proceedings
- Comparing evidence versions to identify specific changes made during analysis, redaction, or expert examination
- Rolling back evidence to prior versions when modifications are disputed or need to be reversed, without losing the record of what was changed
- Supporting parallel analysis workflows where multiple investigators or experts work on the same evidence simultaneously, using branches that can be merged when their work is complete
Integration#
The Evidence Versioning System connects with evidence management, chain of custody, and audit logging systems.
Open Standards#
- RFC 3161 (Internet X.509 PKI Time-Stamp Protocol): Every version snapshot and evidence export package can be cryptographically timestamped via a trusted Timestamping Authority (TSA), producing a verifiable, court-admissible proof of when each version was created.
- FIPS 180-4 / SHA-256: Each version record stores a SHA-256 integrity digest of the evidence file, and Merkle-tree roots over sets of version hashes are computed using the same algorithm to enable batch tamper detection.
- RFC 8032 (Ed25519): Evidence export packages are optionally signed using Ed25519 digital signatures, binding the exported version history to a platform key and providing non-repudiation for court disclosure packages.
- W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0: A signed Verifiable Credential is issued for each evidence collection event and each custody-transfer event, encoding the SHA-256 subject hash, issuer DID, and actor identifiers in a portable JWT-serialised credential.
- ISO 19005 (PDF/A, parts 1, 4): The version export pipeline supports PDF/A-1B, PDF/A-2B, PDF/A-3B, and PDF/A-4F as archival output formats, accommodating court and regulatory requirements for long-term document preservation.
- GraphQL (June 2018 specification): All versioning operations, branch creation, commits, diffs, reviews, and merges, are exposed through a typed GraphQL API, giving clients a self-describing, query-efficient interface to the full version history.
- RFC 6962 (Certificate Transparency / Merkle Hash Trees): The immutable audit chain builds daily Merkle trees over evidence hashes anchored to a TSA token, following the same binary-hash-tree construction used in Certificate Transparency logs to provide inclusion proofs for individual version entries.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-23 Last Updated: 2026-04-14