Towards active linguistic authentication

Abstract

Biometric technologies offer a new and effective means for securing computers against unauthorized access. Linguistic technologies and, in particular, authorship attribution technologies can assist in this effort. This paper reports on the results of analyzing a novel corpus that was developed to test the possibility of active linguistic authentication. The study collected the one-week work product of nineteen temporary workers in a simulated office environment. The results demonstrate that techniques culled from the field of authorship attribution can identify workers with more than 90% accuracy. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.