SYSML: StYlometry with Structure and Multitask Learning: Implications for Darknet Forum Migrant Analysis

Pranav Maneriker, Yuntian He, Srinivasan Parthasarathy


Abstract
Darknet market forums are frequently used to exchange illegal goods and services between parties who use encryption to conceal their identities. The Tor network is used to host these markets, which guarantees additional anonymization from IP and location tracking, making it challenging to link across malicious users using multiple accounts (sybils). Additionally, users migrate to new forums when one is closed further increasing the difficulty of linking users across multiple forums. We develop a novel stylometry-based multitask learning approach for natural language and model interactions using graph embeddings to construct low-dimensional representations of short episodes of user activity for authorship attribution. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our methods across four different darknet forums demonstrating its efficacy over the state-of-the-art, with a lift of up to 2.5X on Mean Retrieval Rank and 2X on Recall@10.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.548
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6844–6857
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.548
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.548
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pranav Maneriker, Yuntian He, and Srinivasan Parthasarathy. 2021. SYSML: StYlometry with Structure and Multitask Learning: Implications for Darknet Forum Migrant Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6844–6857, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SYSML: StYlometry with Structure and Multitask Learning: Implications for Darknet Forum Migrant Analysis (Maneriker et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.548.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.548.mp4
Code
 pranavmaneriker/sysml