Promoting New Technologies to Fight Child Abuse

The post below was submitted by one of our technology partners, International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, highlighting the work of Project Vic, an initiative that is promoting new technologies to fight child abuse. It is a part of a series of posts featuring our partner organizations and their efforts to combat child sexual exploitation.

Child abuse investigations involving images and videos of child exploitation material are very complex. Over the last 10 years, the volume of collected child abuse imagery has gone up exponentially. This creates an environment where it can become physically impossible to go through all of the material without technological assistance. Project Vic is developing practices that allow investigators to minimize time spent reviewing images of children that have already been documented. As technology automates the role of examining new images, the possibility of identifying new victims of child abuse and exploitation is increased.

Technologies to Fight Child Abuse

Project Vic was started in 2012 by a number of Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces and Federal Agencies that wanted to explore areas of their practices and procedures that could make a difference in their ability to save children.

Project Vic members work together to combine and aggregate images and classified image hashes. Then these groups use the hashes to sweep a suspect’s hard drives and devices to classify images. This practice can ultimately pre-classify up to 85% of the material, allowing them to closely examine the remaining 15%.

Project Vic also promotes the use of tools that have adopted image visual matching technologies, such as Microsoft PhotoDNA. The tool providers in the Project Vic ecosystem have also agreed to focus on adopting the use of open standards to import and export hashes between the ecosystems of tools. This way, all of the tools can seamlessly import and export Project Vic hashes without manual intervention or manipulation. This ensures interoperability between tools and services and saves investigators time.

Traditional Image Hashing vs the Project Vic Hash

For years, traditional image hash sets contained binary hashes such as Message Digest 5 (MD5) and SHA1. Project Vic has changed this approach by facilitating an effort through Interpol’s Technical Working Group to create a new hash record format that will securely carry almost all of the metadata of the image including the classification designations provided my numerous entities such as Interpol, NCMEC, and law enforcement departments. This next generation hash record can be imported into the ecosystem of tools and display much more information and allow investigators to make crucial decisions about the direction of their investigations.

Cloud Management of Image Hashes

The millions of Project Vic image hashes are actively managed in a way that allows all law enforcement agencies access, no matter what network they belong to. This is achieved through cloud computing, which eliminates traditional barriers and allows sharing across 28 participating agencies. At any given time, the most up-to-date set of hashes, tools and services are waiting in the cloud for law enforcement agencies.

Standardizing Video Hash Exchanges

Project Vic has now moved on to tackle video hashing between tools and services. Microsoft’s donation of PhotoDNA to the law enforcement and online services community has served to create a standard for the worldwide exchange of image hashes. Now, Friend MTS has donated their video “fingerprinting” technology to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) for distribution to law enforcement and electronic service providers. The F1 video fingerprint technology allows videos to be quickly fingerprinted and to be compared to even smaller fragments of the same or similar videos. The technology has already been distributed to Project Vic tool providers and child protection hotlines. Project Vic is aiming to get the video “fingerprinting” capability into the hands of the frontline investigators and to add the F1 Video Signature to their current hash sets in the cloud.

Partnerships That Make a Difference

Project Vic exists because many individual agencies are willing and able to donate money and contribute resources for our project. Project Vic also relies on in-kind donations of technology and services from companies with strong citizenship programs. We were especially excited about partnering with Thorn, who was able to seed fund Project Vic’s early hashing cloud service.

Our partnerships have come together to make a difference and empower frontline law enforcement in the fight against child sexual exploitation. The evolution of new technologies and the adoption of new procedures will reduce workloads for law enforcement agencies and will allow investigators to better identify new victims and to take on additional activities, ultimately saving more children from sexual exploitation.

Richard W. Brown is the Technology Officer at the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children and serves as Project Vic’s Program Coordinator.  Follow him on Twitter @ICMEC or visit ICMEC.org.  – See more at: http://www.projectvic.org