UK names five projects to get funding for CSAM detection –
Summary
The Home Office has claimed it’s looking for a middle ground that doesn’t require digital service providers to abandon the use of end-to-end encryption but will still allow for CSAM material to be detected and passed to law enforcement, also without the security being backdoored. It is not acceptable to deploy E2EE without ensuring that enforcement and child protection measures are still in place.” The five projects which have been awarded an initial £85,000 apiece by the U.K. government — with a further £130,000 potentially available to be divided up between the “strongest” projects (bringing the total funding pot up to £555,000) — are as follows: • Edinburgh-based digital forensics firm Cyan Forensics and real-time risk intelligence focused Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and the not-for-profit Internet Watch Foundation, which will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms to “detect CSAM by matching content against known illegal material” • Parental control app maker SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University, which will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device — and are intended to “prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced” • Enterprise security firm GalaxKey, based in St Albans, which will work with Poole-based content moderation software maker Image Analyser and digital identity and age assurance firm Yoti to “develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared” • Content moderation startup DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, which will also work with Yoti to combine its on-device nudity AI detection tech with the latter’s age assurance technologies — in order to “spot new indecent images within E2EE environments” • Austria-based digital forensics firm T3K-Forensics has also won UK government funding to implement its AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material — providing what the government bills as “a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services” The winning projects will be evaluated at the end of a five-month delivery phase by an external evaluator — which the government said will look at success criteria including “commercial viability to determine deployability into the market, and long term impact”. Prior guidance put out by DCMS this summer urged social media and messaging firms to “prevent” the use of e2e encryption on child accounts. Assuming, of course, any of the aforementioned projects delivers the claimed CSAM detection/prevention functionality at acceptable levels of accuracy (i.e. avoiding any ruinous false positives). iPhone maker Apple put the rollout of its own on-device CSAM scanning tech — “NeuralHash” — on hold this fall after a privacy backlash.
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