Voyager: Identifying IPs from Online Clicks

Abstract

Cyberpedophilia and the crimes associated with it are a global challenge. The behavior of individuals in a virtual environment is a cause for public concern. Public chat rooms and social media are common ways for individuals with similar sexual preferences to meet and to groom victims. Research of behavioral patterns identified by law enforcement agencies shows an extensive use of graphic images over the chat domains. This thesis recognizes the exchange of graphic media over the chat room domain as a potential loophole which can help to determine the location of a cyber pedophile through the use of graphic images and server side network monitoring tools. The purpose of this research is to develop a preventive network forensics software tool for digital forensic examiners. Our tool, code-named Voyager, works as follows: An examiner uploads an image and a URL for that image is generated. Our system then records information about the remote machine that clicks on the URL of the image. This research also provides a solution to avoid the large data collection and perform live network sniffing with parsing the network packets in real-time and generating the user-defined specific output to MYSQL database.