UniSA and SAPOL ZSAP crime
by Vincent Ciccarello
A
software engineering partnership between UniSA and SA Police to develop
computer crime analysis and computer forensics yielded its first result
with the launch last month of the Zero Skills Analysis Program (ZSAP).
ZSAP improves the identification of electronic evidence of crimes relating to terrorist activity, child pornography, counterfeiting and identity fraud, by allowing police officers without specialist IT training to conduct analysis in the field. SAPOL, which is trialing the program over coming months, expects more rapid detection of offences by using the program.
It is one of a number of products UniSA’s Enterprise Security Management (ESM) Laboratory and SAPOL’s Electronic Crime Section are developing. The two-year old partnership was recently formalised by the signing of a Deed of Collaboration to further a research agenda in the field of security software engineering.
Dr Jill Slay, Director of UniSA’s Enterprise Security Management (ESM) Lab, said in the past 10 years, the amount of electronic crime evidence requiring analysis has increased 100,000-fold.
"Especially with terrorism as an issue, we now have to sift through ever more electronic evidence," she said. "Therefore, we need a system that doesn’t just rely on the expertise of a small core of police investigators working in Adelaide."
Other projects currently being developed by the UniSA/SAPOL partnership include:
- a laptop identification tool to assist police in the recovery of stolen portable computers;
- a communication analysis tool to capture communications to a computer, flagging emails or other data that relates to cyber-stalking;
- and a wireless security project to identify unsecured wireless access points and provide operators with information on securing these points.
ESM was recently awarded a $184,000 grant from the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund to develop forensic tools for the investigation of internet-mediated drug crime.
"The grant provides a full-time post-doctoral research fellow salary to work with me for two years on a comprehensive review of the nature of the major types of drug crime in Australia and then to develop appropriate software tools to support the prevention and investigation of this type of crime," Dr Slay said.