silverspeak 2.2.0

A Python library to perform homoglyph-based attacks on text. It supports both identical and non-identical homoglyphs across multiple languages.

SilverSpeak

This is a Python library to perform homoglyph-based attacks on text.

We also include the experiments supplementing the paper "SilverSpeak: Evading AI-Generated Text Detectors using Homoglyphs".

Installation

You can install this package from PyPI by running:

pip install silverspeak

Usage example

from silverspeak.homoglyphs.random_attack import random_attack

text = "Hello, world!"
attacked_text = random_attack(text, 0.1)
print(attacked_text)

Installation from source

First, you may want to work in a virtual environment. If you don't have one, you can create it by running:

python -m venv .venv

Then, activate it with:

source .venv/bin/activate

You can also use Conda, or any other tool of your preference.

The Python version used in this project is 3.11.0.

Also, remember to install the requirements by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

And finally, install this package by running:

pip install -e .

Reproducing the experimental results from the paper

To reproduce the results, you'll need a free Hugging Face account. You can register for an account here: https://huggingface.co/

Then, you'll need to sign into your account using the CLI with a token that has write permissions (more information here). To do that, just run:

huggingface-cli login

[note] When prompted "Add token as git credential?", you should answer "Yes".

Then, set the MY_HUGGINGFACE_USER environment variable to the username of the account you just registered on Hugging Face by running:

export MY_HUGGINGFACE_USER='your_username'

Then, you can run the run_experiments.sh script. This script will run the experiments for all the models and datasets.

Finally, run the following command to generate the plots and tables:

python experiments/visualization.py

You will also find two notebooks (experiments/divergence_embeddings_attacks.ipynb and experiments/perplexity_tests.ipynb), to reproduce some smaller parts of the paper.

Datasets

We make our datasets, in versions with and without results, at the following URL: https://huggingface.co/silverspeak Specifically, the datasets are provided in two versions, one without the results of the experiments and one including them. The datasets are named as follows:

• Datasets without results:
  • silverspeak/cheat
  • silverspeak/essay
  • silverspeak/reuter
  • silverspeak/writing_prompts
  • silverspeak/realnewslike
• Datasets with results:
  • silverspeak/cheat_with_results
  • silverspeak/essay_with_results
  • silverspeak/reuter_with_results
  • silverspeak/writing_prompts_with_results
  • silverspeak/realnewslike_with_results

AI Disclaimer

We used AI code generation assitance from GitHub Copilot for this project. Nonetheless, the coding process has been essentially manual, with the AI code generator exclusively helping us to speed up the process.

Reproducibility statement

We have tested the code in this repository on a NVIDIA A100 GPU, and have run the experiments twice, independently, to ensure the results are reproducible. We confirm that the results obtained were identical, and thus expect no variation in the results when running the code again. We manually set random seeds where necessary to ensure reproducibility.

Side note: where does the name "SilverSpeak" come from?

The name SilverSpeak comes from the expression "Hablar en plata" in Spanish. While a literal translation would be "Speak in silver", it means "Speak clearly". Therefore, some people would understand the underlying meaning, while those unfamiliar with the expression would likely misunderstand it.

Homoglyph-based attacks are an effective evasion technique since they change the meaning that detectors perceive, while maintaining the same appearance to a human observer. We think the idea can be a metaphor of the system getting "lost in translation", especially considering that homoglyphs are frequently identical characters in different languages.

Hereby the rationale behind our choice of the name SilverSpeak to refer to the family of homoglyph-based attacks that we use in our paper. The attacks play with the understood meaning of the text, depending on who is the observer, taking advantage of codification differences across alphabets.