Together this team met in Tampere during the warm summer, spending two days in August intensively planning the proposal and visiting Finnish saunas in the evening. Their proposal brings together the finest research, technology, and police work in Europe to fight online child sexual abuse. All this was possible, as the DigiSus budget allowed meeting arrangements.
The outcome was not just one Horizon proposal, but two, as Tampere University partnered with another proposal that was closely related to this call. Notably, this small DigiSus seed funding led to Tampere University applying for 0.8 million euros.
Direction of the research
While these proposals aim to develop concrete solutions for this important topic, Nurmi is already preparing preliminary research under yet another Horizon project, SafeHorizon, which received the funding and started in September. The SafeHorizon project has specific tasks to detect and report online child sexual abuse, test new innovative tactics to remove the material, and model criminal networks that distribute the content.
Every day, millions of people use Tor — often known as the dark web — to encrypt communications and make internet browsing untraceable. There are both legal and illegal uses for anonymity. The Tor network provides access to a vast amount of illegal violent material. This exploitation affects many forms of encrypted communication and anonymity networks, not just Tor.
“Security research has largely failed to address the extensive and growing distribution of child sexual abuse material. If security researchers don’t take action, this will soon overwhelm the tools intended for privacy and anonymity. We have already measured that approximately one-fifth of the onion websites on Tor are sharing child sexual abuse material, a trend that is becoming increasingly prevalent and necessitates innovative solutions from security researchers.” said Nurmi.
“Another aspect we can measure is that a significant population of Tor users is seeking child sexual abuse material on Tor. It is obvious to me that new relevant research lines include novel tactics to mitigate this problem — it is not ethical to leave it unsolved.” Nurmi continues.
“However, the complexity of the solutions requires cross-field research across multiple domains, as there are no technical silver bullets available. That is the primary reason I have researched experts from so many fields.” he concludes.
The impact
The anticipated result is to secure funding for new collaborations and cross-disciplinary research. This and ongoing research will obviously be committed to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by protecting children against sexual abuse in digital environments, contributing to “16.2 End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children” and, very concretely, increasing research and law enforcement collaboration to combat child sexual abuse online in Europe, contributing to “5.2 Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation”.
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About the Author:
Juha Nurmi, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Network and Information Security Group, is currently working on the new SafeHorizon project to develop tactics to fight child sexual abuse and cybercrime online. He has published this year, 2024, “Investigating child sexual abuse material availability, searches, and users on the anonymous Tor network for a public health intervention strategy“.
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