Natural Language Processing for Information Assurance and Security: An Overview and Implementations

This paper explores a promising interface between natural language processing (NLP) and information assurance and security (IAS). More specifically, it is devoted to possible applications of the accumulated considerable resources in NLP to IAS. The paper is of a mixed theoretical and empirical nature. Of the four possible venues of applications, (i) memorizing randomly generated passwords with the help of automatically generated funny jingles, (ii) natural language watermarking, (iii) using the available machine translation (MT) systems for (additional) encryption of text messages, and (iv) downgrading, or sanitizing classified information in networks, two venues, (i) and (iv), have been at least partially implemented and the remaining two (ii) and (iii) are being implemented to the proof-of-concept level. We feel that it is important, however, even at this early stage, to review for the information security community what NLP can do for it and to invite feedback and further efforts and ideas in this direction.