Deception in Authorship Attribution

Download or read book Deception in Authorship Attribution written by Sadia Afroz and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In digital forensics, questions often arise about the authors of documents: their identity, demographic background, and whether they can be linked to other documents. The field of stylometry uses linguistic features and machine learning techniques to answer these questions. While stylometry techniques can identify authors with high accuracy in non-adversarial scenarios, their accuracy is reduced to random guessing when faced with authors who intentionally obfuscate their writing style or attempt to imitate that of another author. Most authorship attribution methods were not evaluated in challenging real-world datasets with foreign language and unconventional spelling (e.g. l33tsp3ak). In this thesis we explore the performance of authorship attribution methods in adversarial settings where authors take measures to hide their identity by changing their writing style and by creating multiple identities. We show that using a large feature set, it is possible to distinguish regular documents from deceptive documents with high accuracy and present an analysis of linguistic features that can be modified to hide writing style. We show how to adapt regular authorship attribution to difficult datasets such as leaked underground forum and present a method for detecting multiple identities of authors. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a case study that includes applying our technique to an underground forum and manual analysis to validate the results, enabling the discovery of previously undetected multiple accounts.