Hidden Members and Key Players Detection in Covert Networks Using Multiple Heterogeneous Layers

Abstract

National security is one of the biggest challenges of the world today because of the number of terrorist incidents occurring across the world. It has been seen that suspicious individuals work in very organized groups. They hide themselves between common public and communicate through different media. The whole network is often organized in such a way that all members may not be directly interacting; rather they may be interacting through different mediators and may be using different media for interaction. This type of group is difficult to identify completely because of the presence of mediators and also different media of communication. In order to mitigate the potential risk of terrorist activities, such organized groups are required to be destabilized which is a big challenge for national security organizations. In this paper we propose a new model for detecting such networks. Detection is done by integrating databases having records of associations of suspicious individuals from different domains. 