FIT security research wins Minister of the Interior Award for second year running

The Faculty of Information Technology has once again scored highly in the Minister of the Interior Award for Exceptional Achievements in Security Development. Following last year's victory by Dr. Vladimír Veselý's team (project BAZAR: Building a community on the issue of cashless dark markets), the same success was repeated by the project Set of forensic analytical tools for image and video processing for the criminal police and investigation service, whose main researcher is Ing. Jan Pluskal, Ph.D. from the NES@FIT research group. The project involves the development of a set of forensic analytical tools for image and video processing, which are intended for the criminal police and investigation services of the Czech Police. Among other things, the output is software that significantly speeds up the evaluation of large-scale criminal activity. A significant advantage, which was also taken into account by the competition jury, is the immediate applicability of the developed solutions.

Replacing months of manual and extremely mentally demanding work by criminal investigators with machine processing in a matter of days was one of the motivations of the development team, which consists of experts from the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology and researchers from the Department of Cybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The key software result of the project is the FACIS platform, which automates the process of detecting malicious content and evaluating information in image data from secured memory storage, often up to terabytes in size. According to experts from the Czech Police, this was not possible until now. The previous practice was based on extremely time-consuming, mentally and personally demanding manual work by criminal investigators, who checked suspicious image data file by file. The project outputs also include the entire associated backend and ecosystem, or rather a functional sample: a highly accelerated GPU server, which, thanks to the FACIS platform architecture, offers several times faster data processing than cloud solutions.

The research team at the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology contributes computer vision algorithms to the project. Here, it is necessary to highlight the work of Dr. Tomáš Goldmann's team from the STRaDe@FIT research group – and at the application level. "The practical applicability of the developed tools in operation, which was praised by the first users, is behind us. But not only that," says Jan Pluskal. Researchers at our university are also involved in solving the problem of multimedia data extraction. The research team is working in an area with significant social implications, but at the same time, it is a technically and, in particular, mentally demanding issue. Pluskal himself confirms this. "It's a challenge, no doubt about it. But we are all motivated by the fact that we are doing the right thing and not just generating software that will end up in a drawer. The result is a practical application that will be used. And, of course, we are pleased to be able to help law enforcement agencies."

The prestigious Minister of the Interior Award has been presented since 2011 with the aim of recognizing creators of outstanding results and motivating them to continue their interest in implementing projects. This year, the jury selected from 12 submitted projects. Selected project results were also presented at the world's most prestigious conferences in the field.

Another important security topic is addressed by the project that took second place in the Minister of the Interior Award: Cyber Security of Networks in the Post-Quantum Era. This project is also being implemented at BUT, and its main investigator is Prof. Jan Hajný from FEKT. And let's add that another project from the "kitchen" of FIT VUT, whose main researcher is Doc. Ondřej Ryšavý, took third place. The project Analysis of Encrypted Traffic Using Network Flows focuses on solving phishing and malware problems.