Sennewald, Britta2023-03-012023-03-012020https://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/handle/1882/13775This thesis is about authorship attribution (AA) within multiple Dark Web forums and the question of whether AA is possible beyond the boundaries of a single forum. AA can become a curse for users that try to protect their anonymity and simultaneously become a blessing for law enforcement groups that try to track users. To determine to what extent AA threatens the anonymity of Dark Web users, a dataset of four Dark Web forums was created. Within the analysis, two different approaches are considered: feeding classifiers with posts from two forums, and training classifiers with posts from another forum than what is used for testing. Even for the largest dataset, the author of a post is at least 94% within the top three most likely candidates. This shows that AA can be a danger to the anonymity of Dark Web users across the boundaries of different forums.text/xmlxvii, 153 pageselectronicen-CAhttp://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2master thesis2023-03-01Kent, KennethHerpers, RainerComputer Science