Proposal of the e-Discovery System for Sanitizing Disclosure Information and for Securing Evidence

With the advancement of electronic information, digital forensics is becoming important for securing digital data as evidence. This trend is expected to grow in Future Generation Communication environments. Among digital forensics, the e-Discovery technology is becoming particularly important as a procedure for electronic evidence disclosure. At the disclosure of evidence, necessary electronic documents containing keywords specified by the plaintiff must always be disclosed. In many cases, however, secret or private information is kept confidential for protection (this is called "sanitizing"). If an electronic document with an ordinary digital signature is partially sanitized, the tampering of a non-sanitized section cannot be detected. In addition, keywords may be sanitized to avoid document submission. This paper proposes the e-Discovery system that allows both the sanitizing of disclosure information and the securing of evidence.