Our project will significantly advance forensic methods of investigating mobile devices used for trafficking in digital contraband. While current methods and legislation focus heavily on logical identifiers, we will design, evaluate, and deploy new forensic techniques that focus on consistent and trackable characteristics of mobile computing. Additionally, our work will play an important role in understanding the limits of personal privacy in these settings.
We will develop new radio fingerprinting techniques that detect identifying information present in a radio's low-level components. We seek the comprehensive understanding available from an accurate model of these processes so that we can both determine the key causes of anonymity loss and investigate new countermeasures.
We will develop novel techniques of traffic analysis that determine the source of encrypted Web traffic. Our focus will be on real-world traffic scenarios, where background traffic is present and the entire Internet is a potential source.
We will empirically evaluate our methods in a real-world setting by using two large, outdoor and indoor wireless testbeds that we have deployed.
Our research will directly assist law enforcement that investigate network trafficking of images of child sexual exploitation, demonstrating the usability of trustworthy computing. We will disseminate our results to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the Massachusetts State Police. Additionally, this project will define research pathways to allow students who complete their BS and MS degrees at John Jay (a minority-serving institution) to continue their PhD work at UMass Amherst.
