razorfinger / polylalia

Writing attribution obfuscation using repeated routes through Yandex translation engine

polylalia

Polylalia is an experiment exploring the ability of stylometric analysis of a body of text. Polylalia attempts anonymity by running a body of text through the Yandex translation engine multiple times, ending up with a similar yet somewhat stilted result.

Think of Polylalia as a script that makes Yandex play telephone game with itself and gives you the result. Polylalia only works on plaintext and is modular, so you can import polylalia and use the Polylalia class in your own programs.

Do not use to protect life or property

This is a basic tool for some research I am doing on stylometric fingerprinting and authorship with the tools provided by Drexel University's PSAL. It is meant to prove or disprove a hypothesis that its stylometric techniques are possibly circumventable by readily accessible scripts.

It has not been audited to provide privacy or anonymity of any kind from a stylometric analysis. Also, understand that your raw text is being sent to Yandex, and that you trust Yandex. A user with access to the Yandex logs could fingerprint this script's behavior.

When I have results of it against the stylometry of PSAL et al I will update this document.

Setup/installation

You will need a dependency on yandex.translate, also a free Yandex Translate API key which you can get from Yandex developer site.

# apt-get install -y python-pip
# pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

For command-line use, see ./polylalia.py -h.

License

GNU GPL V3. See LICENSE.

Donate

If you like Polylalia and are interested in stylometry, donate your time by teaching others about the importance of free speech and privacy in your community.