Visible to the public EAGER: TC: Collaborative Research: Experimental Study of Accountability in Existing Anonymous NetworksConflict Detection Enabled

Project Details

Lead PI

Performance Period

Aug 01, 2010 - Dec 31, 2012

Institution(s)

University of Hawaii

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To stop anonymous tools designed for free speech from being abused by criminals, this project investigates practical solutions to trace back criminals while support free speech for benign users, by exploiting two unique perspectives. First, it utilizes the resource advantages of law enforcement to explore the limitations of anonymous tools. As criminals operated from remote locations usually do not have resources to build large-scale systems, they have to rely on existing anonymous tools with third-party resources to hide their traces. Second, the proposed solutions aim to capture some criminals, without a specific target at the beginning. Such assumption greatly simplifies the system design and makes it feasible, different from common traceback solutions which aim at a specific target from the start and usually require heavy costs for large-scaled deployment.

This project will examine the implementation limitations of Freenet for asynchronous communications and Tor for interactive communications, and develop tracing back solutions for law enforcement to identify data sources and parties involved in malicious transactions. Effective methods to penetrate these systems will be designed for collective traffic analysis. By focusing on known malicious data sharing to further identify malicious parties, the proposed solutions will localize data sources and communication parties. Meanwhile, effective mechanisms for protecting benign users? privacy will also be investigated.

The proposed research will provide significant insights to fight cyber crimes. The PIs will integrate research and education to recruit undergraduate and graduate via NHSEMP Program