Canary trap

Posted on August 6, 2007
Filed Under Venture News |

A canary trap or barium meal (terminology of Cold War espionage thrillers) is a method for tracking an information leak by disseminating different versions of sensitive document to each of suspects and watching which version gets surfaced. The term was introduced by Tom Clancy in his novel Patriot Games, though the method itself has been in use far longer. That’s how Jack Ryan, hero of Tom Clancy novel Patriot Games, explains the method:

Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so lurid is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it.

Michael Arrington in his post Orbious Will Make Forwarding Confidential Documents Dangerous profiles a new startup Orbious that supposedly makes dissemination and tracking of confidential documents easy by using canary trap technique. Orbious replaces a few words in original document by their synonyms thus creating unique version of the document.

Actually application built by Orbious has a lot of common with bad espionage thriller - both are absolutely disattached from reality. The weaknesses of synonym-based canary trap are pretty obvious:

Artificially changing content of original corporate documents is not something your lawyer would recommend. Other techniques, like steganography or digital signature, do not interfere with content of documents.
running spell checker/thesaurus would effectively neutralize uniqueness of the document
Will you trust your confidential documents to third party service provider like Orbious?

There is definitely a category of users that will benefit immensely from Orbious - sploggers would love the tools to re-process original content.

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