Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

Xin Li

Committee Co-Chair

Donald Adjeroh

Committee Member

Donald Adjeroh

Committee Member

Roy Nutter

Abstract

Due to its anonymity, there has been a dramatic growth of underground drug markets hosted in the darknet (e.g., Dream Market and Valhalla). To combat drug trafficking (a.k.a. illicit drug trading) in the cyberspace, there is an urgent need for automatic analysis of participants in darknet markets. However, one of the key challenges is that drug traffickers (i.e., vendors) may maintain multiple accounts across different markets or within the same market.

To address this issue, in this thesis, we propose and develop an intelligent system named uStyle-uID leveraging both writing and photography styles for drug trafficker identification at the first attempt. At the core of uStyle-uID is an attributed heterogeneous information network (AHIN) which elegantly integrates both writing and photography styles along with the text and photo contents, as well as other supporting attributes (i.e., trafficker and drug information) and various kinds of relations. Built on the constructed AHIN, a meta-path based approach is exploited to incorporate higher-level semantics to establish relatedness over traffickers. To efficiently measure the relatedness over nodes (i.e., traffickers) in the constructed AHIN, we propose a new network embedding model Vendor2Vec to learn the low-dimensional representations for the nodes in AHIN, which leverages complementary attribute information attached in the nodes to guide the meta-path based random walk for path instances sampling. After that, we devise a learning model named uIdentifier to classify if a given pair of traffickers are the same individual. Comprehensive experiments based on the data collections from four darknet markets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of uStyle-uID which integrates our proposed method in drug trafficker identification by comparisons with alternative approaches.

Embargo Reason

Publication Pending

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