5 ms·

Human Side-Channels: Behavioral Traces We Leave

51 points by 80mph 7y ago

nerdponx 7y ago
Tangentially on-topic, but with all the popularity of style transfer nowadays, has writing style transfer been done yet?
- pacman83 7y ago
  http://twin.sci-hub.se/6607/74f935079576886e116256e5869ec69b/wayner1992.pdf http://twin.sci-hub.se/6607/74f935079576886e116256e5869ec69b... Albeit primitive by today's standards, it impressed me at the time.
joncrane 7y ago
Seems kind of rough....so you receive a ransom email and you do a fuzzy grep of the entire internet to see if forum posts with a similar "linguisitic signature" exist anywhere? You'd have to narrow down that search significantly to get any results in any kind of reasonable time.
- evgen 7y ago
  It depends on the corpus. Stylometry (which is the actual name for this, not 'forensic linguistics') can be surprisingly accurate if it has a good selection of text to work with. How hard do you think it would be to crawl public facebook posts, reddit posts, posts to various hacker forums, and build a corpus large enough to connect the dots? I am betting it is a lot easier than most people think. Next steps will be application of GANs and similar tools to stylometry to either give your posts a linguistic signature of someone else or to just remove enough unique data points to obscure the source.
jmkd 7y ago
The article refers to other behavioural traces in addition to forensic linguistics. I imagine these refer to aspects such as how and when we login to systems, our patterns of interaction with everyday interfaces, paths we typically take online and so on. Seems a fascinating area, anyone with other resources on this?
- floatrock 7y ago
  There was a startup a while back making a login auth system based on the gait of your walk. Apparently phones' accelerometers are good enough to throw all the data at some ML stuff and uniquely fingerprint people based on how they walk. This is also the idea behind Google's click-to-confirm-I'm-not-a-robot captcha system... they track everything from how you move the mouse to how you scroll the page to differentiate bots from humans.
bpchaps 7y ago
Funny they say that, considering much tracking their site has....
ThrustVectoring 7y ago
Back when naval communication was radio communication of manually keyed morse code, one major source of naval intelligence was recognizing the "hand" transmitting messages via the timing patterns of key entry. The messages were encrypted and that wasn't broken, but the timing patterns were essentially in the clear and gave up some useful information. I wouldn't be surprised if you could generate signatures from the timing patterns of text input events in javascript, too.
- sidpatil 7y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if you could generate signatures from the timing patterns of text input events in javascript, too. If I remember correctly, some MOOCs make their users type out an honor statement in lieu of a handwritten signature, and record the timing information as you suggested.
youllPAYforTHAT 7y ago
Meh. The point being that the internet need not be an authoritative system of damning evidence, but more honestly a constant runoff of disgusting effluence and neutral solvent, laced with a minuscule fraction of redeeming nonsense. There’s lots of plastic wrap that encases huge blobs of bile and rancid offal, an interminable off gassing of useless ticker tape and discarded life lines once marking points of reference and benchmarks, but here and there you’ll find a chunk of pristine vegetation, still edible and unspoiled amid the heap of trash. Read all my every blurb and the sum total of my stream of consciousness if you must, but I apologize not for my transient moods or default, unscripted blather. Sometimes I drink. Do what you will about that.

51 points by 80mph 7y ago

Tangentially on-topic, but with all the popularity of style transfer nowadays, has writing style transfer been done yet?

pacman83 7y ago
http://twin.sci-hub.se/6607/74f935079576886e116256e5869ec69b/wayner1992.pdf http://twin.sci-hub.se/6607/74f935079576886e116256e5869ec69b... Albeit primitive by today's standards, it impressed me at the time.

joncrane 7y ago

Seems kind of rough....so you receive a ransom email and you do a fuzzy grep of the entire internet to see if forum posts with a similar "linguisitic signature" exist anywhere? You'd have to narrow down that search significantly to get any results in any kind of reasonable time.

evgen 7y ago
It depends on the corpus. Stylometry (which is the actual name for this, not 'forensic linguistics') can be surprisingly accurate if it has a good selection of text to work with. How hard do you think it would be to crawl public facebook posts, reddit posts, posts to various hacker forums, and build a corpus large enough to connect the dots? I am betting it is a lot easier than most people think. Next steps will be application of GANs and similar tools to stylometry to either give your posts a linguistic signature of someone else or to just remove enough unique data points to obscure the source.

jmkd 7y ago

The article refers to other behavioural traces in addition to forensic linguistics. I imagine these refer to aspects such as how and when we login to systems, our patterns of interaction with everyday interfaces, paths we typically take online and so on. Seems a fascinating area, anyone with other resources on this?

floatrock 7y ago
There was a startup a while back making a login auth system based on the gait of your walk. Apparently phones' accelerometers are good enough to throw all the data at some ML stuff and uniquely fingerprint people based on how they walk. This is also the idea behind Google's click-to-confirm-I'm-not-a-robot captcha system... they track everything from how you move the mouse to how you scroll the page to differentiate bots from humans.

bpchaps 7y ago

Funny they say that, considering much tracking their site has....

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

Back when naval communication was radio communication of manually keyed morse code, one major source of naval intelligence was recognizing the "hand" transmitting messages via the timing patterns of key entry. The messages were encrypted and that wasn't broken, but the timing patterns were essentially in the clear and gave up some useful information. I wouldn't be surprised if you could generate signatures from the timing patterns of text input events in javascript, too.

sidpatil 7y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if you could generate signatures from the timing patterns of text input events in javascript, too. If I remember correctly, some MOOCs make their users type out an honor statement in lieu of a handwritten signature, and record the timing information as you suggested.

youllPAYforTHAT 7y ago

Meh. The point being that the internet need not be an authoritative system of damning evidence, but more honestly a constant runoff of disgusting effluence and neutral solvent, laced with a minuscule fraction of redeeming nonsense. There’s lots of plastic wrap that encases huge blobs of bile and rancid offal, an interminable off gassing of useless ticker tape and discarded life lines once marking points of reference and benchmarks, but here and there you’ll find a chunk of pristine vegetation, still edible and unspoiled amid the heap of trash. Read all my every blurb and the sum total of my stream of consciousness if you must, but I apologize not for my transient moods or default, unscripted blather. Sometimes I drink. Do what you will about that.