London: Scientists have discovered a new system which enables to scan traffic on the Internet for illegal photographs.
According to the researchers the system can help trace child pornography on the Internet without violating the privacy of Internet users. The new facility would be helpful to Internet service providers to keep their network clean.
The police often uses a standard database to detect illegal photographs, like child pornography, on seized computer related equipments including USB sticks.
For security reasons, the aforesaid database cannot be used to scan networks such as the Internet. If the database were happened to be in criminal hands, they could use it to make their own illegal photographs untraceable.
With the new system, the police database can be used to scan a network as well. It traces out the illegal photographs without the fear of reaching the database in wrong hands.
The standard police database does not contain any truly illegal photographs except features of these photographs expressed in numbers (hash values).
When the police seize equipment, such as a PC, the database is activated to compare the known hash values with those of the photographs on the PC.

Video on Internet Scanning