Hijacking Text Heritage: Hiding the Human Signature through Homoglyphic Substitution
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| Formato: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917466106494976 |
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| author | Dilworth, Robert |
| author_facet | Dilworth, Robert |
| contents | In what way could a data breach involving government-issued IDs such as passports, driver's licenses, etc., rival a random voluntary disclosure on a nondescript social-media platform? At first glance, the former appears more significant, and that is a valid assessment. The disclosed data could contain an individual's date of birth and address; for all intents and purposes, a leak of that data would be disastrous. Given the threat, the latter scenario involving an innocuous online post seems comparatively harmless--or does it? From that post and others like it, a forensic linguist could stylometrically uncover equivalent pieces of information, estimating an age range for the author (adolescent or adult) and narrowing down their geographical location (specific country). While not an exact science--the determinations are statistical--stylometry can reveal comparable, though noticeably diluted, information about an individual. To prevent an ID from being breached, simply sharing it as little as possible suffices. Preventing the leakage of personal information from written text requires a more complex solution: adversarial stylometry. In this paper, we explore how performing homoglyph substitution--the replacement of characters with visually similar alternatives (e.g., "h" $\texttt{[U+0068]}$ $\rightarrow$ "h" $\texttt{[U+04BB]}$)--on text can degrade stylometric systems. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10271 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Hijacking Text Heritage: Hiding the Human Signature through Homoglyphic Substitution Dilworth, Robert Cryptography and Security Computation and Language Information Retrieval In what way could a data breach involving government-issued IDs such as passports, driver's licenses, etc., rival a random voluntary disclosure on a nondescript social-media platform? At first glance, the former appears more significant, and that is a valid assessment. The disclosed data could contain an individual's date of birth and address; for all intents and purposes, a leak of that data would be disastrous. Given the threat, the latter scenario involving an innocuous online post seems comparatively harmless--or does it? From that post and others like it, a forensic linguist could stylometrically uncover equivalent pieces of information, estimating an age range for the author (adolescent or adult) and narrowing down their geographical location (specific country). While not an exact science--the determinations are statistical--stylometry can reveal comparable, though noticeably diluted, information about an individual. To prevent an ID from being breached, simply sharing it as little as possible suffices. Preventing the leakage of personal information from written text requires a more complex solution: adversarial stylometry. In this paper, we explore how performing homoglyph substitution--the replacement of characters with visually similar alternatives (e.g., "h" $\texttt{[U+0068]}$ $\rightarrow$ "h" $\texttt{[U+04BB]}$)--on text can degrade stylometric systems. |
| title | Hijacking Text Heritage: Hiding the Human Signature through Homoglyphic Substitution |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Computation and Language Information Retrieval |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10271 |