An Integrated Multi-Layered Anonymous Whistle-blowing Platform with Steganographic Covert Channels, Immutable Blockchain Evidence Custody, and AI Authenticity Verification
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Whistleblowers play a critical role in exposing corruption, fraud, and human rights violations, yet existing digital reporting platforms such as GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop offer limited security layers, leaving reporters vulnerable to identification, evidence tampering, and submission of manipulated media. This paper presents BEACONSAFE (Blockchain Encrypted Anonymous-AIoT Cryptographic Onion Network System for Advanced Forensic Evidence), a novel multi-layered whistleblowing platform that integrates six complementary security technologies into a unified architecture. The proposed system combines Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography with AES-256-CBC encryption for covert evidence embedding, a custom zero-dependency SOCKS5 proxy with TOR onion routing for network anonymity, blockchain-based evidence hashing on the Polygon network with ERC-721 tokens for immutable chain-of-custody, and a multi branch EfficientNet-B0 deep learning model for three-domain deepfake detection covering human, animal, and object categories. Additionally, the platform incorporates IoT-based sensor evidence collection using ESP32 microcontrollers and a three-tier authentication system supporting email, anonymous identifier, and Ethereum wallet signature-based login. The system architecture, design rationale, and implementation details are presented , along with a comparative analysis against existing whistleblowing platforms demonstrating that, to the best of author's knowledge, the proposed system is among the first to address covert communication, evidence integrity, and authenticity verification within a single integrated framework.
Institution: NSBM Green University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7219681790