File Name Classification Approach to Identify Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

When Law Enforcement Agencies seize a computer machine from a potential producer or consumer of Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM), they need accurate and time-efficient tools to analyze its files. However, classifying and detecting CSEM by manual inspection is a high time-consuming task, and most of the time, it is unfeasible in the amount of time available for Spanish police using a search warrant. An option for identifying CSEM is to analyze the names of the files stored in the hard disk of the suspect person, looking in the text for patterns related to CSEM. However, due to the particularity of this file names, mainly its length and the use of obfuscated words, current file name classification methods suffer from a low recall rate, which is essential in the context of this problem. This paper presents our ongoing research to identify CSEM through their file names. We evaluate two approaches of short text classification: a proposal based on machine learning classifiers exploring the use of Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machine and an approach using deep learning by adapting two popular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models that work on character-level. The presented CNN achieved an average class recall of 0:86 and a recall rate of 0:78 for the CSEM class. The CNN based classifier could be integrated into forensic tools and services that might support Law Enforcement Agencies to identify CSEM without the need to access systematically to the visual content of every file.