My PhD
Title:
Human in the Loop Approach to Lawful Interception
Stakeholder:
ITSUS Consulting Ltd
The Research:
Due to security edicts it is becoming essential to be able to perform lawful Intercept (LI) tasks on large volumes of data with more and more of it becoming encrypted. The goals of the project will include working in different areas (not just security) to achieve this. To facilitate human decision making in the field, the information will also need to be presented in an understandable fashion. One challenge is how to involve human decision making in a system processing so much data at speed. Facilitating the final decision can be taken off-line, but it will be a significant challenge to manage these human decision-making processes in close to real-time.
This project is driven by an actual request for capability by the Home Office. The nature of the project will be to categorise traffic without breaking encryption if possible. This would then flag traffic for human decision making in line with laws and regulations. It is important that we do not infringe of any rights to privacy for example in the methods chosen.
It is our goal with this project to further the capability of the technologies related to Lawful Intercept (LI) to match the needs of a rapidly changing and developing world. We aim to build on the current state of the art technology, which will be provided through our partner, and investigate ways that this can be improved to match the increasing demands of the digital world to ensure threats are detected without detriment to others. We will be working with our project partners SS8 to advance the current state-of-the-art techniques provided by their hardware in a virtualised environment to combine high speed probes with so-called smart probe technology. In this endeavour, we will also leverage our relationships with Palo Alto Networks, and IXIA solutions to create a robust and realistic test environment, capable of simulating traffic experienced in a real-world network situation. As a result of this project, we hope to have greatly increased our understanding of the field, and the overall capacity of the field to adapt to new changes in technology and usage patterns. Through our ties to industry and government it is another goal to use what we discover in this project to inform and produce valuable guidelines that will help this field continue to adapt and further provide these to the standards committees as well as UK based institutions. We know from our partner SS8 that not only will these benefits have an impact on the law enforcement sector but can also be utilised in defence and other aspects of society to protect national assets. Our plan for this research is to be able to take the research concepts into the "real world" developing solutions to security problems as they become apparent. This will not only provide valuable innovation for the security sector but will also allow for development of the fellow and his team, and the company moving into a field that would not be possible without the support of the UKRI.