EAGER: ISN: Detecting and Disrupting Illicit Supply Networks via Traffic Distribution Systems

This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) will enhance national health, prosperity, and security by contributing to our understanding of and ability to disrupt the online infrastructure that supports illicit supply networks. Malicious advertising is responsible for exposing a large fraction of online users to malicious content, including content from illicit supply networks, such as those trafficking in fake luxury goods and counterfeit pharmaceuticals. These abusive services not only exfiltrate private information and cause economic harm, but can also, in the case of unlicensed pharmaceutical products, damage public health. This project focuses on developing methods to detect and disrupt these illicit supply chains by targeting the traffic distribution systems that enable them, i.e., the online hosts that are responsible for redirecting users from gateway pages to the final abusive service. Mapping these networks and ultimately taking down their hosts will increase the cost of illicit commerce, yielding positive economic and public health impact. The award will provide support to engage graduate students in research with high societal impact. The project seeks to understand, measure, model, and disrupt traffic distribution systems as well as characterize the effects of this disruption on the pricing of illicit goods and services. By devising multiple high-toxicity URL streams and automatically crawling these URLs on a daily basis from multiple geographical locations and multiple browsing agents, this project will enable the collection of a large number of traffic distribution systems as well as the abusive services that utilize them. The project includes the development of techniques for converting the collected network traces into directed graphs, the attribution and merging of nodes belonging to the same actors, and the use of these graphs for modeling the effects of takedowns in the presence of operational constraints. This research will discover and document how these illicit operations function, improve the automated detection of their abusive services, and provide data to other researchers on the operations of traffic distribution systems and their vulnerability to disruptions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.