‘Knuckles can be new fingerprints in child sexual abuse investigations’

Identification of one’s knuckles could be the next big step in cracking cases relating to online child sexual exploitation, a challenge faced by law enforcers worldwide. A tool to identify perpetrators of such crimes using the images of knuckles is being developed by a group of international researchers. The Kerala police are learned to be in talks with the researchers to make use of the tool, which is in the testing stage.

“One’s knuckles have unique features that you can use to identify a person. It’s like a fingerprint,” said Kate Seigfried-Spellar, professor, School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, who is part of the research team. She was in Kochi to attend c0c0n 2025, a cybersecurity conference.

“The perpetrators of such crimes often hide their faces in videos. The images of the hand region in the child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) are compared with those of a suspect,” Ms. Seigfried-Spellar explained. She said manual identification of knuckles is done by law enforcers in certain cases, but the tool is aimed at automating the process and thus making it faster and more efficient.

The developers have tested the tool with two data sets collected as part of academic research, and now they are going to test it using actual CSAM cases. The testing has shown a 95% accuracy rate, Ms. Seigfried-Spellar said. “When we release it for testing, Kerala police will absolutely be included in the process,” she said.

P. Prakash, Inspector General of Police, who came to know about the research during a visit to the U.S., called it an interesting area of investigation. “We need advanced tools, especially to identify online child abuse offenders. If we get access to the tool being developed, we can test it,” he said.

He said Kerala has been reporting many cases of consumption of CSAM. “It is absolutely wrong to watch such content. By consuming such materials published online, no matter which part of the world it has originated from, one is victimising the children in the content over and over again,” he said.