‘Uh-oh Spaghetti-oh’: When Successful Genetic and Evolutionary Feature Selection Makes You More Susceptible to Adversarial Authorship Attacks

Feature selection is a technique used to reduce an original set of features to a subset containing the most salient features. Reducing the feature set to the most significant subset of features typically results in an increase in the overall accuracy of a system. It has been shown that in some cases, the use of feature selection can make an underlying system susceptible to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we investigate the susceptibility of a feature selection-based Authorship Attribution System (AAS) to adversarial authorship attacks. The AAS studied is an instance of a Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM). The feature selection algorithm used is an instance of Genetic & Evolutionary Feature Selection (GEFeS)In order to evaluate the GEFeS+LSVM-based AAS, we use three adversarial authorship masking techniques to generate adversarial texts to attack the AAS. Our results show that in some cases the GEFeS+LSVM-based AAS is more susceptible to adversarial authorship attacks. We provide a simple measurement to determine whether the use of GEFeS is beneficial or detrimental to a LSVM-based AAS.