Abstract
This column aims to describe the characteristics of current cyberpsychology research in Europe. In particular, CyberEurope aims at describing the leading research groups and projects running on the other side of the Ocean.
A
Blockchain technology is an electronic ledger under decentralized control, which allows it to evade traditional investigative measures. The best-known application of Blockchain technology is Bitcoin, which has many legitimate uses but is also used for criminal purposes on the so-called dark web (i.e., the part of the Internet that is beyond the reach of Google and other search engines). The attackers who froze computers in 150 countries last year during the infamous WannaCry ransomware attack demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin.
The researchers are in a consortium undertaking a 3-year, €5 million project, funded by the European Union (EU) aimed at developing technical solutions for investigating and mitigating crime and terrorism involving virtual currencies and underground market transactions.
The researchers, including four law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and INTERPOL, aim to develop and implement tools to reveal common characteristics of criminal transactions, detect anomalies in their usage, and identify money laundering techniques. The researchers will also conduct training activities in order to develop skills and knowledge among EU law enforcement agencies.
As part of their project, which is called TITANIUM (Tools for the Investigation of Transactions in Underground Markets), the researchers plan to test and validate their tools and services on the premises of the LEAs to assess the effectiveness and overall impact of the project results.
Project coordinator Ross King, a senior scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, said, “Criminal and terrorist activities related to virtual currencies and darknet markets evolve quickly and vary in technical sophistication, resilience and intended targets.”
To counter such activities, Dr. King said it was necessary to develop efficient and effective forensics tools enabling the reasonable use of different types of data from different sources, including virtual currency ledgers, online forums, peer-to-peer networks of underground markets, and seized devices.
Dr. King also emphasized that the tools developed within the TITANIUM project will respect individual privacy and other fundamental rights. “The consortium will analyse legal and ethical requirements and define guidelines for storing and processing data, information, and knowledge involved in criminal investigations without compromising citizen privacy.”
Specifically, the project will:
• Establish a research and development environment that enables close and continuous collaboration between researchers, developers, legal experts, and law enforcement stakeholders in several European countries and regions; • Analyze legal and ethical requirements for tools and services, elicit technical requirements from stakeholders, and establish a development ecosystem that ensures compliance with these requirements and supports the generation of court-proof evidence; • Implement tools for the automated aggregation of data from diverse sources, including the dark web, the surface web, and other sources and devices obtained through legal warrants, using multimodal adaptive crawlers, stealth facilities, and smart filters; • Provide services for the simulation of criminal activities and the generation of synthetic data; • Investigate customizable heuristics, which can operate across different virtual currency transaction ledgers and identify clusters of addresses that are likely to belong to the same real-world entity; • Apply novel techniques based on machine learning and deep neural networks for revealing patterns, detecting anomalies, and identifying tumblers and mixers used for money laundering; and • Deploy forensics tools and services to partner LEAs and conduct field labs to assess the effectiveness, ethical and legal compliance, and overall impact of the results and to validate those results at technology readiness level (TRL) 6 or higher.