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Catching Crypto Criminals with AI and Big Data toolkit

The Office of National Intelligence and the Department of Defence National Security Science and Technology Centre is funding the National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (NISDRG) program, which was awarded to Associate Professor Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy from the School of Information and Communication Technology and his project partners Professor Ryan Ko from the University of Queensland and Professor Marimuthu Palaniswami from the University of Melbourne.

Associate Professor Muthukkumarasamy said that cryptocurrency comes with anonymity or pseudo-anonymity, so law enforcement authorities find it very difficult to link certain payments with illegal activity.

As it is not a central bank-issued currency, it is not controlled by any organisation or any country. This project will create new tools based on artificial intelligence to analyse anonymised transactions and link them with financial crime patterns to effectively identify perpetrators. It will develop a novel investigative toolkit to facilitate attribution – such as source identification and legal evidence – of criminals linked to digital payments to crime in almost real-time.

Associate Professor Muthukkumarasmy said there were no algorithms or techniques to unravel the hidden connections from a massive network of digital payments, which is being misused by criminals. Therefore, the proposed big data analytics will exploit the hidden connections and reveal the linkages to automatically reconstruct the provenance – information flows and payment histories of criminal activities – in near real-time.

There are more than 2000 unregulated cryptocurrencies worldwide. These massive digital networks and the frequency with which anonymous transactions occur pose numerous challenges to the existing financial systems’ stability and the ability of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to intelligently identify and link these transactions to crimes.

With the advent of cryptocurrencies, criminals can hide their identities and launder money by transferring their illicit collection into digital wallets.

These transactions can be tracked as they are based on public ledgers and there is a traceable link for each transaction. However, criminals can then use services such as ‘mixing’ or ‘tumbling’ to convert ‘dirty money’ into ‘clean money’.

The services also break a transaction into smaller amounts, which are then sent to clusters of new addresses in the network repeatedly, and finally arriving at the ‘clean wallet’. This process removes the link from ‘dirty wallet’ to the ‘clean wallet’ and therefore, cannot establish the link to the ‘root wallet’.

The money that is now in the ‘clean wallet’ can be used for legitimate purposes.

Associate Professor Muthukkumarasamy pioneered the Network Security teaching and research at Griffith University and is leading the Networking & Security and Blockchain Research Group at the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems. He also led the development of the first Master of Cyber Security program in Queensland.

The aims of the project include:

  • Design and develop an efficient multi-source feature extraction mechanism to facilitate gathering intelligent information and security alerts about suspicious cryptocurrency payments;
  • Design and build a high usability automated provenance reconstruction tool to facilitate forensic investigators for real-time attribution of payments to crime.

The Minister for Defence announced Griffith as among the eight Australian universities to receive funding for projects in the first round of the NISDRG program. He noted that the targeted funding for Australia’s higher education sector will enhance our ability to deal with threats to our national interests through the development of cutting-edge technology. The three-year project ‘Linking Digital Payments to Crime Using Big Data Machine Learning Tools’ received $590,843 in funding.

PARTNER

Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATION

SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

PARTNER

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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