Weaponizing Noam Chomsky

I wanted to ask Dan Kaminsky, who btw is a brilliant presenter (more below), about doing grammar and writing style analysis to determine who wrote a paper. I can see the techniques as potentially having forensic uses. Don't ask me what his talk was about, I would not be able to recall any useful details. Here is what his talk description stated:

Weaponizing Noam Chomsky, or Hacking with Pattern Languages There is no man page for the English language, but kids pick it up anyway (more or less). There is deep structure hidden inside every human generated language, especially those we intend to fuzz. I will discuss and demonstrate new, useful, and purty purty tools for rendering complex patterns automatically, potentially in realtime, and breaking things with it. New toys will be released, including a generic XML fuzzer (rawk!).

This was my first time seeing Dan talk and it was very entertaining and surprising to watch him react and respond to questions from the audience. No matter how annoying or frequently the questions came, he was quick on his feet(even after drinking four beers) to counter-attack.

Posted by Marcin on Sunday, March 25, 2007 in Intelligence and Security.