Abstract <p>Efficacious management of digital evidence is crucial to streamline investigations, secure evidence repositories, and efficiently handle digital artefacts. Traditional digital evidence management (DEM) systems experience single points of failure and trust problems. Decentralisation can address several shortcomings of centralised systems; however, security issues such as the risk of log alteration by malicious insiders and the absence of fine-grained access control still exist in such systems. Current access control mechanisms can mitigate these threats, but introduce intensive computational overhead, leading to efficacy and scalability issues. Moreover, the priority of most of these access policies is to ensure confidentiality, i.e., selective disclosure, whereas in DEM, data integrity, i.e., ensuring digital evidence is not modified or corrupted, is of prime concern. Therefore, a suitable access control mechanism is needed to enforce strict integrity controls over data modification rights and controlled disclosure in a DEM system. This paper introduces Dashdikpala, a blockchain-based digital evidence data protection mechanism with lightweight access control,s log management and secure off-chain storage. Dashdikpala uses the BIBA model deployed through smart contracts to provide a dynamic yet lightweight access control and tamper-proof log management. InterPlanetary File System is utilised for off-chain storage, and data confidentiality is ensured by employing All or Nothing keyless Transformation. We compare the security of our framework with existing models, validate and verify it using BAN Logic and Real-or-Random (RoR) threat model, and demonstrate its effectiveness through smart contract implementation and performance analysis.</p> Graphic abstract <p></p>