Users posting online expect to remain anonymous unless they have logged in, which is often needed for them to be able to discuss freely on various topics. Preserving the anonymity of a text's writer can be also important in some other contexts, e.g., in the case of witness protection or anonymity programs. However, each person has his her own style of writing, which can be analyzed using stylometry, and as a result, the true identity of the author of a piece of text can be revealed even if s he has tried to hide it. Thus, it could be helpful to design automatic tools that can help a person obfuscate his her identity when writing text. In particular, here we propose an approach that changes the text, so that it is pushed towards average values for some general stylometric characteristics, thus making the use of these characteristics less discriminative. The approach consists of three main steps: first, we calculate the values for some popular stylometric metrics that can indicate authorship; then we apply various transformations to the text, so that these metrics are adjusted towards the average level, while preserving the semantics and the soundness of the text; and finally, we add random noise. This approach turned out to be very efficient, and yielded the best performance on the Author Obfuscation task at the PAN-2016 competition.
Research in author obfuscation has explored manual, computer-aided, and automated obfuscation @cite_20 . For manual obfuscation, people have tried to mask their own writing style as somebody else's, which was shown to work well @cite_2 @cite_14 @cite_12 . Computer-aided obfuscation uses tools that identify and suggest parts of text and text features that should be obfuscated, but then the obfuscation is to be done manually @cite_9 @cite_5 @cite_16 .
@cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_20 @cite_12
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Anonymous authoring includes writing reviews, comments and blogs, using pseudonyms with the general assumption that using these pseudonyms will protect the real identity of authors and allows them to freely express their views. It has been shown, however, that writing style may be used to trace authors across multiple Websites. This is a serious threat to privacy and may even result in revealing the authors's identities. In obfuscating authors' writing style, an authored document is modified to hide the writing characteristics of the author. In this paper we first show that existing obfuscation systems are insecure and propose a general approach for constructing obfuscation algorithms, and then instantiate the framework to give an algorithm that semi-automatically modifies an author's document. We provide a secure obfuscation scheme that is able to hide an author's document securely among other authors' documents in a corpus. As part of our obfuscation algorithm we present a new algorithm for identifying an author's unique words that would be of independent interest. We present a security model and use it to analyze our scheme and also the previous schemes. We implement our scheme and give its performances through experiments. We show that our algorithm can be used to obfuscate documents securely and effectively. We address the problem of how to “obfuscate” texts by removing stylistic clues which can identify authorship, whilst preserving (as much as possible) the content of the text. In this paper we combine ideas from “generalised differential privacy” and machine learning techniques for text processing to model privacy for text documents. We define a privacy mechanism that operates at the level of text documents represented as “bags-of-words”—these representations are typical in machine learning and contain sufficient information to carry out many kinds of classification tasks including topic identification and authorship attribution (of the original documents). We show that our mechanism satisfies privacy with respect to a metric for semantic similarity, thereby providing a balance between utility, defined by the semantic content of texts, with the obfuscation of stylistic clues. We demonstrate our implementation on a “fan fiction” dataset, confirming that it is indeed possible to disguise writing style effectively whilst preserving enough information and variation for accurate content classification tasks. We refer the reader to our complete paper [15] which contains full proofs and further experimentation details. The use of stylometry, authorship recognition through purely linguistic means, has contributed to literary, historical, and criminal investigation breakthroughs. Existing stylometry research assumes that authors have not attempted to disguise their linguistic writing style. We challenge this basic assumption of existing stylometry methodologies and present a new area of research: adversarial stylometry. Adversaries have a devastating effect on the robustness of existing classification methods. Our work presents a framework for creating adversarial passages including obfuscation, where a subject attempts to hide her identity, and imitation, where a subject attempts to frame another subject by imitating his writing style, and translation where original passages are obfuscated with machine translation services. This research demonstrates that manual circumvention methods work very well while automated translation methods are not effective. The obfuscation method reduces the techniques' effectiveness to the level of random guessing and the imitation attempts succeed up to 67p of the time depending on the stylometry technique used. These results are more significant given the fact that experimental subjects were unfamiliar with stylometry, were not professional writers, and spent little time on the attacks. This article also contributes to the field by using human subjects to empirically validate the claim of high accuracy for four current techniques (without adversaries). We have also compiled and released two corpora of adversarial stylometry texts to promote research in this field with a total of 57 unique authors. We argue that this field is important to a multidisciplinary approach to privacy, security, and anonymity. The ability to identify authors of computer programs based on their coding style is a direct threat to the privacy and anonymity of programmers. While recent work found that source code can be attributed to authors with high accuracy, attribution of executable binaries appears to be much more difficult. Many distinguishing features present in source code, e.g. variable names, are removed in the compilation process, and compiler optimization may alter the structure of a program, further obscuring features that are known to be useful in determining authorship. We examine programmer de-anonymization from the standpoint of machine learning, using a novel set of features that include ones obtained by decompiling the executable binary to source code. We adapt a powerful set of techniques from the domain of source code authorship attribution along with stylistic representations embedded in assembly, resulting in successful de-anonymization of a large set of programmers. We evaluate our approach on data from the Google Code Jam, obtaining attribution accuracy of up to 96 with 100 and 83 with 600 candidate programmers. We present an executable binary authorship attribution approach, for the first time, that is robust to basic obfuscations, a range of compiler optimization settings, and binaries that have been stripped of their symbol tables. We perform programmer de-anonymization using both obfuscated binaries, and real-world code found "in the wild" in single-author GitHub repositories and the recently leaked Nulled.IO hacker forum. We show that programmers who would like to remain anonymous need to take extreme countermeasures to protect their privacy.