About

This site is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote a standardized taxonomy of terms used in forensic investigations related to the Dark Web and Virtual Assets.

History

The initial idea and concept arose during the delivery of the H2020 Project TITANIUM. Under this project one of the key performance indicator was related to the automated exchange. Data produced by one tools is enriched by going though another tools For this purpose, the project stakeholders and solution providers needed a common language and some communication protocols.

The TITANIUM consortium consulted several teams working on potential candidates for such a taxonomy. The closest one to the requirements and needs of Law Enforcement was found to be the Unified Cybercrime Ontology and the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE). While these Ontologies describe everything related to Digital Forensics they did not include Forensics applied to Dark Web and Cryptocurrencies.

At this stage (July 2019), at its 3rd meeting, the INTERPOL Working Group on Darknet and Cryptocurrencies, acknowledged the lack of such a standard and suggested the establishment of a dedicated Task Force. The first meeting of this Task Force was held in December 2019, in Singapore at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI). The Task Force designed the broad concepts and an initial version of this taxonomy while a core group of founding partners was tasked to continue and maintain this collaborative work.

Refining further the taxonomy, we changed its name to reflect the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) vocabulary and now use the terms "Dark Web" and "Virtual Assets".

Purpose

This taxonomy aims at providing a scheme for data exchange and analysis for any tools and datasets involving artifacts from Dark Web and Virtual Assets. It shall be suitable for tagging and documenting metadata around scrapped contents, ledgers, clustered transactions and wallets and their affiliated resources.