Generating Fake Documents Using Probabilistic Logic Graphs

Qian Han, Cristian Molinaro, Antonio Picariello, Giancarlo Sperli, V. S. Subrahmanian, Yanhai Xiong*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

Past research has shown that over 8 months may elapse between the time when a network is compromised and the time the attack is discovered. During this long gap, attackers can steal valuable intellectual property from the victim. The recent FORGE system [8] has suggested that automatically generating fake - but believable - versions of documents can delay the attacker, cost him money, and increase his uncertainty. However, in order to generate fakes, FORGE only modifies the textual component of the document in question. But in the real world, documents consist of many non-textual components such as charts, equations, formulas, diagrams, and tables. We propose the concept of a Probabilistic Logic Graph (PLG) and show that PLGs provide a single, unified framework within which the different parts of a document can be expressed. We then define the problem of generating, for a given PLG representation of a document, a set of fake yet highly believable PLGs (i.e., documents), so that an attacker looking at them (both the original and the fake ones) cannot easily identify the original document. We show that the problem of generating fake PLGs is intractable - but we propose an approximation algorithm that solves it efficiently. We evaluate the use of PLGs over a corpus of patents and show that our fakes can effectively deceive an adversary.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2428-2441
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
Volume19
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Deception
  • cybersecurity
  • fake documents
  • intellectual property

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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