Slashdot Mirror
Unmasking Anonymous Email Senders
alphadogg writes "Just because you send an email anonymously doesn't mean people can't figure out who you are anymore. A new technique developed by researchers at Concordia University in Quebec could be used to unmask would-be anonymous emailers by sniffing out patterns in their writing style from use of all lowercase letters to common typos. Their research, published in the journal Digital Investigation, describes techniques that could be used to serve up evidence in court, giving law enforcement more detailed information than a simple IP address can produce."
run it thru pretty print or some other formatter before sending it.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Sooo... if I want to write an anonymous letter I just switch from my usual grammar natzi mode to my OMFG i c4/Vz p0ns0r your org MANNNN!
Turns out most spam is written by e e cummings.
Who'd have thought it?
who always types part of the body of his message in the subject line.
Yes but unlike writing this can be easily duplicated. Writing using someone else's style isn't an easy task. Doing it with a keyboard, very easy.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
wherefore did I ever adopt such a distinctive writing style.
I'm not saying the research is worthless, but their techniques are easily defeated.
It would be simple to write a program that would iteratively "fuzz" your message with typos, lowercase/uppercase toggling, etc. and check the result against their algorithm until the message could no longer be tied to you.
I'm sure someone could do it in 10 lines of Perl, or less.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
Use Google translate. Translate it into Spanish, then into German, then back into English, then into LEET.
It should be simple to obscure the style and weaknesses of the author with this method.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is why I cut & paste each word of anonymous emails from an online dictionary.
Untraceable.
Is something burning?
Oh, it's my karma.
But this is on a computer... On the internet. That's like double implicit innovation.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains. - Evilest Doe
It used to be that people would cut words from magazines and other papers to make ransom notes so no one could recognize their hand writing.
With this concept moving to the computer and internet, it will be trivial to find words, phrases, auto generation scripts and so on to do the digital equivalent. In fact, I think there are several programs out there that will pull random lines of text from several sources on the internet, take a real message and create a image of some sort to lay information over top of it, all just to get around spam filters. (disable the display of image in your email and you will be surprised at what is underneath them sometimes).
But something I can see this really having a problem with is how easy it might make the chance at setting someone else up to take a fall. Suppose you and I have emailed each other for quite some time now. I saved all our correspondence and farmed them to find phrases and word misspellings, cut and pasted them to make statements you never intended to make, then sent them off to threaten the president. Something even more disturbing, suppose we know each other in real life and I have the hots for your wife. I make my way into your house, plant some pipes and fertilizer beside some diesel fuel in one of your closets, get on your computer, sign up for a free email address from it using fake information and start spamming chat rooms and emailing government officials your intent to kill the president.
The actual research paper is at
http://www.dfrws.org/2008/proceedings/p42-iqbal.pdf
Note that it was published in 2008. So Slashdot is reporting relatively quickly here.
I long ago gave up any idea that my writing would be very anonymous...
As an American working in software companies in India for ten years, whenever managers sent out surveys they said would be "totally anonymous" I always figured with my American writing style (complete sentences, very few typos, no "spel it like u sa it", active voice, writing out our product and company name in full) everyone would recognize it was my writing anyway... And that was usually the case, as people who weren't supposed to know who wrote what would invariably reply to me, "hey, why did you write that?"
Even worse than false negatives would be false positives. Maybe those death threats to your boss sound just like you, use the same words you use, the same grammar, everything. That's because your jealous coworker pirated himself a copy of this program, fed some writing of yours through it, and then kept editing those death threats until the program claimed they sounded just like you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I actually write in different styles, and used that for different RPG game systems and stories - now all I have to do is go to a nearby cafe (cant go a block without running into two) and use their free computers using different personas.
In fact, I think I'll start studying the writing styles of Cheney, Rove, and Fnarf and using them as writing templates for my next posts ...
Pretty easy to do.
I think most of my current personae are quite radically different in writing style from my other published pseudonyms.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here is an except that proves anonymous post is correct:
But even Unabombers are not infallible. Exulting in his apparent mastery of the FBI, the master criminal made his mistake, in the form of a 35,000- word treatise on the "Future of Industrial Society", which he submitted to the Washington Post and New York Times. If they published the rambling, anti-technology manifesto, the writer said, he would cease his campaign. After much soul-searching, the two papers did so on 20 September 1995, on the advice of the FBI.
Relatives in Chicago were struck by similarities between some of Ted Kaczynski's earlier writings and the rambling musings of the Unabomber's tract, and eventually his brother informed the FBI. And so the trail of 18 years, dotted with 200 detained suspects along the way, led to a hand- built cabin near the Continental divide. But the tale may not yet be over.
Here is the article from the Independent.
I recollected that this was how the Unabomber was finally caught, via relatives who read his writings and recognized him... I respect that some mods might not like anonymous cowards, but if they are correct they should not be modded down, at least not to be fair.
Or maybe that person really COULD care less, but their current level of caring is so low it doesn't matter.
For example, I've tried to translate the next Slashdot article's blurb:
"Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a "sip:" prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked "great.""
"Disruptive" was translated as "explosive" in the sense of "trinitrotoluene", and "great" was translated as "big". Translating it back resulted in:
"Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service is now a way to make a clean Internet phone calls Make a call with SIP. "Sip:" prefix, Google Voice phone transmits the number and@sip.voice.google.com common telephone network fully, saving minutes of mobile phone users. Explosive Telephone tested it and found that the call worked "big""
You can probably still guess the meaning, but it's not exactly easy.
Every once in awhile, I get a trollish and insulting comment on my blog. Usually, the commenter leaves the name field anonymous but leaves a valid email address as an invitation for me to take the bait and respond. A quick google search of the email often reveals other trollish comments posted by the same user elsewhere on the internet, and usually they slip up at least once and leave their name. From there, it's pretty easy to find out more personal information.