Authorship Verification of Online Messages for Forensic Investigation

Online messaging provides a convenient and effective means of fast communication. Along with personal communication it is being used by organizations for official communication. Many organizations make use of online messaging for exchanging sensitive and secret information. Although online messaging is used for legitimate purpose, it can be misused by various means. An attacker may masquerade as legitimate user by hijacking the connection or by conducting man-in-the-middle attack or by obtaining physical access to a user's computer. The reason behind masquerade as someone else could be spying, snooping and other malicious intentions. Unsupervised Techniques for Forensic Analysis of online messages are relatively unexplored area in Authorship Analysis research. This paper explores the application of unsupervised techniques for authorship Verification problem. The approach is based on comparing the similarity between a given unknown documents against the known documents using various features so that an unknown document can be classified as having been written by the same author.