Stylometry
New Scientist posted a writeup about a new paper on stylometry published by researchers Michael Brennan & Rachel Greenstadt at Drexel University. It was an interesting read. They missed a recent publication from last year’s DFRWS conference dealing with authorship identification from anonymous emails etc. The former is referring to the concept as “Stylometry” whereas the later uses the term “Write Print.” The basic idea is an individual’s writing will have a consistent style sufficiently unique from writing at large to link back to the author. In general, various facets of the writing (word choice, tense, grammatical constructs, etc) are parsed and reduced to statistical information fed into various AI classification techniques; thereafter the classifier trained on an individual’s known writing can be used to classify unknown writing samples as belonging to a given individual with some probability.
Disturbing Trends Across the Pond
Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data
Since October 2007 when the refusal to disclose decryption keys was made criminal in the UK, the buzz around the smallish digital forensics research community has been alarm. Security researcher, by definition always on the lookout for failings in a system, immediately proposed a situation in which encrypted data is present on a system for which the user did not have the decryption key thus creating a crime through ignorance, not of the law but of the key. As reported by the Register in the above link, two individuals have been convicted under this ridiculous law.