As the rules for countering money laundering constantly change, criminals find new methods and platforms to launder their “dirty” money. Recently, such new platforms have included the art market and the use of crypto currencies. Subsequently, both of these sectors were added to the list of sectors susceptible to facilitate money laundering. Apart from the traditional art market, criminals may use digital art in order to facilitate their activities. The rise of the digital art market with the expansion of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is a new area of concern for law enforcement agencies. Anonymity and price volatility of NFTs create a unique and exploitable environment for criminals. The complex nature and uncertain legal status of NFTs further complicate the counter measures one can take. This paper explains what NFTs are, analyses their relation to money laundering risks and scrutinises their legal status in the EU. In doing so, it identifies gaps in the law and training needs of law enforcement agencies. Finally, the paper provides potential solutions and recommendations in relation to these gaps. The paper offers a novel study on NFTs and aims to pave the way for further comparative studies related to NFTs.
Mohamed Al Ali, Ahmed Adel Ismail, Hany M. Elgohary, Saad M. Darwish · 5 authors
Digital evidence is critical in cybercrime investigations because it is used to connect individuals to illegal activity. Digital evidence is complicated, diffuse, volatile, and easily altered, and as such, it must be protected. The Chain of Custody (CoC) is a critical component of the digital evidence procedure. The aim of the CoC is to demonstrate that the evidence has not been tampered with at any point throughout the investigation. Because the uncertainty associated with digital evidence is not being assessed at the moment, it is impossible to determine the trustworthiness of CoC. As scientists, forensic examiners have a responsibility to reverse this tendency and officially confront the uncertainty inherent in any evidence upon which they base their judgments. To address these issues, this article proposes a new paradigm for ensuring the integrity of digital evidence (CoC documents). The new paradigm employs fuzzy hash within blockchain data structure to handle uncertainty introduced by error-prone tools when dealing with CoC documents. Traditional hashing techniques are designed to be sensitive to small input modifications and can only determine if the inputs are exactly the same or not. By comparing the similarity of two images, fuzzy hash functions can determine how different they are. With the symmetry idea at its core, the suggested framework effectively deals with random parameter probabilities, as shown in the development of the fuzzy hash segmentation function. We provide a case study for image forensics to illustrate the usefulness of this framework in introducing forensic preparedness to computer systems and enabling a more effective digital investigation procedure.
Open access
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Archaeological Research and Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.
Matthieu Nadini, Laura Alessandretti, Flavio Di Giacinto, Mauro Martino · 6 authors
Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that represent objects like art, collectible, and in-game items. They are traded online, often with cryptocurrency, and are generally encoded within smart contracts on a blockchain. Public attention towards NFTs has exploded in 2021, when their market has experienced record sales, but little is known about the overall structure and evolution of its market. Here, we analyse data concerning 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs between June 23, 2017 and April 27, 2021, obtained primarily from Ethereum and WAX blockchains. First, we characterize statistical properties of the market. Second, we build the network of interactions, show that traders typically specialize on NFTs associated with similar objects and form tight clusters with other traders that exchange the same kind of objects. Third, we cluster objects associated to NFTs according to their visual features and show that collections contain visually homogeneous objects. Finally, we investigate the predictability of NFT sales using simple machine learning algorithms and find that sale history and, secondarily, visual features are good predictors for price. We anticipate that these findings will stimulate further research on NFT production, adoption, and trading in different contexts.
Béla Gipp, Norman Meuschke, Joeran Beel, Corinna Breitinger
The proportion of information that is exclusively available online is continuously increasing. Unlike physical print media, online news outlets, magazines, or blogs are not immune to retrospective modification. Even significant editing of text in online news sources can easily go unnoticed. This poses a challenge to the preservation of digital cultural heritage. It is nearly impossible for regular readers to verify whether the textual content they encounter online has at one point been modified from its initial state, and at what time or to what extent the text was modified to its current version. In this paper, we propose a web-based platform that allows users to submit the URL for any web content they wish to track for changes. The system automatically creates a trusted timestamp stored in the blockchain of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin for the hash of the HTML content available at the user-specified URL. By using trusted timestamping to secure a ‘snapshot’ of online information as it existed at a specific time, any subsequent changes made to the content can be identified.
Open access
Archaeological Research and Protection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
At present, there are many information security issues in the digitization of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The digital information of ICH is vulnerable to malicious tampering, stealing or attacks. The blockchain technology has the characteristics of distribution, un-tamper and traceability, which enhances security in the process of protecting digital information. Therefore, this paper discusses the integrity protection and the encryption protection from the perspective of blockchain encryption technology and provides a reference for the network security research of the ICH digital resources.
Blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin and other digital currencies, offers promise to shift the gathering and sharing of information in profound ways. It could help form a new kind offinancial system that limits current inefficiencies, or even radically change how parties enter into contract, or monitor supply chains. The technology's distributed ledger allows users in a network to monitor and access peer-to-peer digital transactions in real time. This digital ledger allows users to maintain this information securely by encrypting and allowing access only to those who have permission, given by cryptographic keys. For the art market, blockchain offers a tantalizing possibility. a verifiable provenance research platform that would eliminate or minimize the problems with title history, authenticity, and looting, which have long-plagued the art and antiquities market. This essay examines whether blockchain might offer a chance for the antiquities market to remedy its persistent problems. The antiquities market has been beleaguered by the sale of forgeries, allowed stolen material to find a market, been hampered by market inefficiencies, and even been a haven for looted archaeological material. Distributed ledgers and blockchain could alleviate or eliminate these problems, but only if the market and those who shape it want to utilize them. No technology, no matter how ingenious or elegant, can end problems caused by the unprincipled actors in the antiquities trade. Such change has to come about with a culture shift and continued pressure by regulators and cultural heritage advocates.
With the tremendous development of internet, we can share any media from anywhere in the world. This paved the way for data sharing illegally versions of data shared among persons. In our proposed system, the original data (use case taken Song) will be embedded with a hash value and then deployed to Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and shared through Ethereum Blockchain, enabling deployed data unaltered. The IPFS returns a 46-bit length hash for each of the file being upload. Usage of Ethereum blockchain ensures each every transaction cryptographically hashed and logged. Also, the data deployed on IPFS sharable but with hidden hash identity for each of it, which is not known by the person who gets that data. The owner of the original data thus shares the data and w having the log maintaining hash identity for each of the person to whom the data owner shares. The IPFS storage enables Peer to Peer (P2P) data transfer through decentralized network. The person will be given the IPFS hash to download the data. When data if pirated is known to the owner, he computes the hash value from the pirated version and identifies the person pirated that data and avoids sharing data to that person next time
Long Finance’s Distributed Futures research programme is pleased to announce the release of its first three approaches to ‘geo-stamping’, along with a short guide. Time-stamping is an important part of Smart Ledgers (aka block-chains with embedded code), an authoritative record of the time of a transaction. Geo-stamping is a mirror image, an authoritative record of the location of a transaction. Geo-stamping = time-stamping + geo-location information.
Long Finance’s Distributed Futures research programme has an open source project, “GeoGnomo” to research and share methods for geo-stamping. Geo-stamping benefits from having memorable ways of recording areas that also aid efficient retrieval. GeoGnomo has built-to-share three approaches for recording areal information, a Quaternary Triangular System, a Quaternary Rectangular System, and a Variable Rectangular System for geo-stamping. Each can be used to record geographic areas into a block-chain.
GeoGnomo provides source code and an online translation from latitude & longitude areas to geo-codes and back. Thus, block-chain applications have almost an instant ‘global post code’ or ‘global zip code’ system. By using consistent geo-coding data retrieval is easier. Users can share information easily – “tell the drone to come to F49PUR9B7-20”, a resolution of 7.6 metres.
This report was commissioned by the Cardano Foundation in November 2017 and is one of the first outputs from a series of projects in the Distributed Futures research programme. Michael Parsons, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, comments “Geo-stamping and time-stamping are two of the most important functions of Smart Ledgers. Our sponsorship of Distributed Future’s GeoGnomo project is directed at sharing mechanisms for geo-stamping that are memorable, aggregable, proximable, and scalable.”