Investigation and Surveillance on the Darknet: An Architecture to Reconcile Legal Aspects With Technology

摘要

While powerful techniques enable to perform efficient forensics and police activities, more or less soon legal aspects limit the capacity for technical action. Aside the fact that what is technically feasible may be legally forbidden, from the judge's point of view, the evidence must be admissible and therefore comply with a rigorous legal framework. Moreover the forensics expert or the criminal investigator must not put himself in danger. In this paper, we are addressing the case of criminal investigation and surveillance over the Darknet. In this parallel network, a lot of criminal activities are conducted and most the time the fact to collect evidences might be considered as itself criminal. We could mention the particular case of child pornography among many others. We have designed an architecture that enables anyone to take part in the surveillance and criminal investigations over the Darknet while complying with all the known legal constraints. Our tools also succeed in bypassing several securities deployed on websites or hidden services such as banishment by IP address or crawler traps.