RESEARCHERS
Brian Levine
Marc Liberatore
Brian Lynn
Emmanuel Cecchet
Alexander Wise
Ryan Hurley
Swagatika Prusty
Hamed Soroush
Robert Walls
PARTNERS
Massachusetts Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force
Crimes Against Children Research Center
PA Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force
MISSION OF THE
COMMONWEALTH CENTER
Our Forensics Center is a partnership of two institutions from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: UMass Amherst and the MA State Police Crime Laboratory. Begun in 2010, the Center's work advances digital forensics science & technology, addressing the challenge of the protean nature of computer systems and the Internet. Our core mission is to develop and apply novel research and technology in forensics and privacy to address the interests of government, law, and society. In addition to fellow computer scientists, we work closely with partners at the UNH Crimes Against Children Research Center and Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces in several states.
We seek to bring together partners across government, industry, and academia to advance scientific and societal understanding of the issues raised by digital forensics technologies. Please contact us to get involved with the Center.
We regularly publish new results on digital forensics and criminal investigation. We are also active in transitioning our research to the field. To date, over 2,200 arrests for Internet-based child sexual exploitation have been made based on our Center's research and technolgy.
LATEST
NEWS
Brian Levine was invited to give testimony to the US Sentencing Commission hearing on "Federal Child Pornography Offenses" in Washington, DC on February 15, 2012.
Robert J. Walls will be presented with an Oustanding Synthesis Project award from the Department of Computer Science at UMass for his work on DEC0DE (Usenix Security 2011). A synthesis project is completed by all doctoral students at UMass, in order to stretch their experience beyond their main dissertation topic. Robert's work combined techniques from forensics and machine learning.
Together with Janis Wolak of the CCRC, we a received a new research award from Dept of Justice/OJJDP on discovering contact offenders (Marc Liberatore, PI). We also received a renewal of our award from Dept of Justice/NIJ on digital evidence (Brian Levine, PI).
Forensic Investigation of the OneSwarm Anonymous Filesharing System appeared in ACM CCS 2011! By Swagatika Prusty, Brian Levine, Marc Liberatore.
Our position paper on the differences between security and forensics appeared at USENIX Hot Topics in Security 2011: Effective Digital Forensics Research is Investigator-Centric by Robert J. Walls, Brian Levine, Marc Liberatore, and Clay Shields
Our latest work on phone forensics appeared at USENIX Security 2011: Forensic Triage for Mobile Phones with DEC0DE by Robert J. Walls, Erik Learned-Miller, and Brian Levine.
Robert J. Walls is the winner of an extremely competitive 2011 Yahoo Key Scientific Challenge award in the Security & Privacy category.
Appeared at ACM CoNEXT 2010: Strengthening Forensic Investigations of Child Pornography on P2P Networks.
Our work was featured in the Dept.
of Justice's National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and
Interdiction: A Report to Congress.
See the latest news stories of arrests that involve evidence gathered by tools developed at UMass.