TITANIUM: Tools for the Investigation of Transactions in Underground Markets

The Second TITANIUM Hackathon: From Tools to Field Labs

Vienna (09 October 2018)

The second TITANIUM Hackathon will be organized on the premises of AIT in Vienna, on 17 and 18 October 2018. The first hackathon (Soesterberg, April 2018) focused on becoming acquainted with the technical infrastructure in TITANIUM and to create initial pipelines. After this hackathon, the technical project partners proceeded with developing tools for supporting investigation of crimes involving virtual currencies and/or underground darknet markets. During the field labs the tools will be deployed in a practical situation and tested by the LEA project partners.

The second hackathon will present the currently existing and deployable tools to the LEA partners in the project, on a ‘tool and demo market’. After exposure to the tools, they are invited to present their idea of a use case supported with a subset of adequate tools. Technicians will extract operational, functional and deployment demands from the LEA partners. After the hackathon, the various technical teams will start working on getting the selected tools ready for the upcoming field labs in January 2019, using intensive feedback cycles with the LEAs. The central goal of the second hackathon is therefore to immerse LEAs in the available tools, extract their views, and to form actionable plans for successful field lab deployment.

One of the means for bringing tools closer to the LEA practice is to present LEAs with a narrative that outlines the role of various tools for a line of investigation. During the hackathon such a narrative will be presented: a generic use case, formulated as a forensic, stepwise investigation process with actual tools (either developed or planned) supporting every step. Additionally, we will devote attention to tool integration: how can the TITANIUM tools be integrated or interfaced with existing LEA tools and databases? Here, we envisage the use of common interface languages for forensic information exchange (such as UMF or the new, upcoming standard CASE).