Note:
This awardee has received supplemental funding. This award detail page includes information about the supplemental awards but the information about the original award is unavailable.
Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2008, $150,000)
The UnMask system will provide law enforcement with a sophisticated toolkit that is practical, easy to use, secure, and powerful enough to serve as the focal point for the forensic analysis of suspect email. The goal of the UnMask project is to automate the investigation of email-based crimes. Continued funding will allow ECIT to integrate the following new capabilities into the system: (1) develop enhanced analysis and parsing tools to support the automatic generation of a targeted and simple report that will supplement and perhaps be more useful to law enforcement as compared with a comprehensive report dump; (2) enhance the UnMask system so that it is reasonably easy to deploy at law enforcement agencies with proper and adequate security considerations; (3) develop an Unmask Toolkit with substantial functionality including the ability to open emails in a virtual environment to analyze the behavior of email attachments; and (4) research the notion of accountability and its relationship to the UnMask system as it relates to the development of software architectures.
This project contributes to the reduction of crime laboratory computer evidence backlog principally through automation of the forensic process as it relates to email based crimes.
nca/ncf