Analysis System for Gathered Raw Data

The information available on-line and off-line, from open as well as from private sources, is growing at an inestimable rate placing ever increasing demand on the limited resources of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). The absence of appropriate tools and techniques to collect, process, and analyse the pronounced volumes of complex and heterogeneous data has created a severe information overload.

ASGARD aims at building a sustainable, long-lasting community of LEAs, industry and technology providers that will take care of creating (at no cost for LEAs), maintaining and evolving the best set possible of tools for the extraction, fusion, exchange and analysis of big data including cyber-offenses generated data for forensic investigation. With forensics being the main focus of the project, both intelligence and foresight dimensions will also be tackled by ASGARD. The resulting tools will exploit recent advances in the ICT sector and will be designed in a way that they are easily and rapidly deployable to face threats and needs as they emerge. Within ASGARD, the role of end-users, the LEAs, is of utmost importance. Their involvement in the project will have two clearly distinct phases:

• in the initial phase a closed and private community with a set of key partner and observer LEAs will help setting up the community and will work in identifying and prioritizing the tools most demanded by LEAs, they will participate and or support the initial developments, and they will evaluate the initial releases of tools and applications in order to provide feedback that will help refining them, and
• in the second phase “the community” will be opened up to a wider audience of interested LEAs.

Three final demonstrations are planned, focused on:

1. forensic evidence from Big Data,
2. data exchange and situational awareness and 
3. cyber-offenses.

ASGARD has been conceived and will be implemented considering four key aspects:

1. Use cases: End-user needs, which are driving the use cases and requirements definition.
2. Processes: The digital forensic, intelligence, and foresight processes that are in use by LEAs.
3. Technology: The technology already available today as state of the art which will be adapted and made available to LEAs within the first research and development cycles, but also novel technologies that go beyond the state of the art and that the technology providers of the consortium will develop and provide to LEAs during the project.
4. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Privacy (SELP): SELP aspects that have to be considered and that are a key element for the sustainability and success of the concept proposed by ASGARD.