Collected research

PDF Mirage: Content Masking Attack Against Information-Based Online Services

Ian Markwood, Dakun Shen, Yao Liu and Zhuo Lu · usenix.org

Rigging a PDF's font glyph mapping makes the text a human reads differ completely from the text an extractor recovers. This subverts conference reviewer-assignment systems so authors can steer papers to colluding reviewers, evades Turnitin at a chosen plagiarism score, and plants hidden keywords in the Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo indexes.

Record

Researcher

Ian Markwood, Dakun Shen, Yao Liu and Zhuo Lu

Published by

usenix.org

Topic

Other

In the archive

• Collected in the 2016–17 research round

Tags

• pdf
• parser-differential
• filter-bypass
• detection
• mitigation
• owasp-a05-2021
• owasp-a09-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Ian Markwood, Dakun Shen, Yao Liu and Zhuo Lu, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 19 August 2026.