
Human Side-Channels: Behavioral Traces We Leave - 80mph
https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/human-side-channels-behavioral-traces-we-leave-behind/d/d-id/1335129
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ThrustVectoring
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.

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sidpatil
> 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.

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jmkd
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?

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floatrock
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.

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joncrane
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.

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evgen
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.

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

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

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

