Defending Against Authorship Identification Attacks

TL;DR

This paper reviews methods to protect individual privacy against authorship identification by analyzing and summarizing two decades of research on obfuscation techniques, highlighting their effectiveness, limitations, and future challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing defenses against authorship identification, emphasizing methodological frameworks and identifying open challenges for future research.

Findings

Obfuscation techniques can effectively hinder authorship attribution.

Differential privacy approaches are increasingly integrated into defenses.

Current methods face limitations in balancing privacy and content integrity.

Abstract

Authorship identification has proven unsettlingly effective in inferring the identity of the author of an unsigned document, even when sensitive personal information has been carefully omitted. In the digital era, individuals leave a lasting digital footprint through their written content, whether it is posted on social media, stored on their employer's computers, or located elsewhere. When individuals need to communicate publicly yet wish to remain anonymous, there is little available to protect them from unwanted authorship identification. This unprecedented threat to privacy is evident in scenarios such as whistle-blowing. Proposed defenses against authorship identification attacks primarily aim to obfuscate one's writing style, thereby making it unlinkable to their pre-existing writing, while concurrently preserving the original meaning and grammatical integrity. The presented work offers a comprehensive review of the advancements in this research area spanning over the past two decades and beyond. It emphasizes the methodological frameworks of modification and generation-based strategies devised to evade authorship identification attacks, highlighting joint efforts from the differential privacy community. Limitations of current research are discussed, with a spotlight on open challenges and potential research avenues.