24,247 research outputs found
On the Feasibility of Malware Authorship Attribution
There are many occasions in which the security community is interested to
discover the authorship of malware binaries, either for digital forensics
analysis of malware corpora or for thwarting live threats of malware invasion.
Such a discovery of authorship might be possible due to stylistic features
inherent to software codes written by human programmers. Existing studies of
authorship attribution of general purpose software mainly focus on source code,
which is typically based on the style of programs and environment. However,
those features critically depend on the availability of the program source
code, which is usually not the case when dealing with malware binaries. Such
program binaries often do not retain many semantic or stylistic features due to
the compilation process. Therefore, authorship attribution in the domain of
malware binaries based on features and styles that will survive the compilation
process is challenging. This paper provides the state of the art in this
literature. Further, we analyze the features involved in those techniques. By
using a case study, we identify features that can survive the compilation
process. Finally, we analyze existing works on binary authorship attribution
and study their applicability to real malware binaries.Comment: FPS 201
Fighting Authorship Linkability with Crowdsourcing
Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature,
blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet
today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as
product or service reviews, is an important and increasingly popular type of
content that is being used as a foundation of many trendy community-based
reviewing sites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. Some recent results have shown
that, due partly to their specialized/topical nature, sets of reviews authored
by the same person are readily linkable based on simple stylometric features.
In practice, this means that individuals who author more than a few reviews
under different accounts (whether within one site or across multiple sites) can
be linked, which represents a significant loss of privacy.
In this paper, we start by showing that the problem is actually worse than
previously believed. We then explore ways to mitigate authorship linkability in
community-based reviewing. We first attempt to harness the global power of
crowdsourcing by engaging random strangers into the process of re-writing
reviews. As our empirical results (obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk)
clearly demonstrate, crowdsourcing yields impressively sensible reviews that
reflect sufficiently different stylometric characteristics such that prior
stylometric linkability techniques become largely ineffective. We also consider
using machine translation to automatically re-write reviews. Contrary to what
was previously believed, our results show that translation decreases authorship
linkability as the number of intermediate languages grows. Finally, we explore
the combination of crowdsourcing and machine translation and report on the
results
Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017
Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work.
In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland).
The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success
Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World
Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.Our Space was co-developed by The Good Play Project and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking and conduct among young people when exercising new media skills
An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities
In online discussion communities, users can interact and share information
and opinions on a wide variety of topics. However, some users may create
multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by
deceiving others or manipulating discussions. In this work, we study
sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities, and show that sockpuppets
differ from ordinary users in terms of their posting behavior, linguistic
traits, as well as social network structure. Sockpuppets tend to start fewer
discussions, write shorter posts, use more personal pronouns such as "I", and
have more clustered ego-networks. Further, pairs of sockpuppets controlled by
the same individual are more likely to interact on the same discussion at the
same time than pairs of ordinary users. Our analysis suggests a taxonomy of
deceptive behavior in discussion communities. Pairs of sockpuppets can vary in
their deceptiveness, i.e., whether they pretend to be different users, or their
supportiveness, i.e., if they support arguments of other sockpuppets controlled
by the same user. We apply these findings to a series of prediction tasks,
notably, to identify whether a pair of accounts belongs to the same underlying
user or not. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of deception in
online discussion communities and paves the way towards the automatic detection
of sockpuppets.Comment: 26th International World Wide Web conference 2017 (WWW 2017
Beyond funding: Acknowledgement patterns in biomedical, natural and social sciences
[EN] For the past 50 years, acknowledgments have been studied as important paratextual traces of research practices, collaboration, and infrastructure in science. Since 2008, funding acknowledgments have been indexed by Web of Science, supporting large-scale analyses of research funding. Applying advanced linguistic methods as well as Correspondence Analysis to more than one million acknowledgments from research articles and reviews published in 2015, this paper aims to go beyond funding disclosure and study the main types of contributions found in acknowledgments on a large scale and through disciplinary comparisons. Our analysis shows that technical support is more frequently acknowledged by scholars in Chemistry, Physics and Engineering. Earth and Space, Professional Fields, and Social Sciences are more likely to acknowledge contributions from colleagues, editors, and reviewers, while Biology acknowledgments put more emphasis on logistics and fieldwork-related tasks. Conflicts of interest disclosures (or lack of thereof) are more frequently found in acknowledgments from Clinical Medicine, Health and, to a lesser extent, Psychology. These results demonstrate that acknowledgment practices truly do vary across disciplines and that this can lead to important further research beyond the sole interest in funding.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships, Paul-Hus; Insight Development [grant number 430-2014-0617], Lariviere and Desrochers; as well as by funding from the South African DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciSTIP), Rodrigo Costas.Paul-Hus, A.; Arias-Diaz-Faes, A.; Sainte-Marie, M.; Desrochers, N.; Costas, R.; Larivière, V. (2017). Beyond funding: Acknowledgement patterns in biomedical, natural and social sciences. PLoS ONE. 12(10). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185578S121
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