[IP] Schneier plagiarized
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bradley Malin <malin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 15, 2005 8:49:20 AM EDT
To: Multiple recipients of list stop <stop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: STOP:: Schneier plagiarized
Reply-To: malin@xxxxxxxxxx
From this month's Cryptogram (Bruce Schneier):
Plagiarism and Academia: Personal Experience
A paper published in the December 2004 issue of the SIGCSE Bulletin,
"Cryptanalysis of some encryption/cipher schemes using related key
attack," by Khawaja Amer Hayat, Umar Waqar Anis, and S. Tauseef-ur-
Rehman, is the same as a paper that John Kelsey, David Wagner, and I
published in 1997.
It's clearly plagiarism. Sentences have been reworded or summarized a
bit and many typos have been introduced, but otherwise it's the same
paper. It's copied, with the same section, paragraph, and sentence
structure -- right down to the same mathematical variable names. It
has the same quirks in the way references are cited. And so on.
We wrote two papers on the topic; this is the second. They don't list
either of our papers in their bibliography. They do have a lurking
reference to "[KSW96]" in the body of their introduction and design
principles, presumably copied from our text; but a full citation for
"[KSW96]" isn't in their bibliography. Perhaps they were worried that
one of the referees would read the papers listed in their
bibliography, and notice the plagiarism.
The three authors are from the International Islamic University in
Islamabad, Pakistan. The third author, S. Tauseef-Ur-Rehman, is a
department head (and faculty member) in the Telecommunications
Engineering Department at this Pakistani institution. If you believe
his story -- which is probably correct -- he had nothing to do with
the research, but just appended his name to a paper by two of his
students. (This is not unusual; it happens all the time in
universities all over the world.) But that doesn't get him off the
hook. He's still responsible for anything he puts his name on.
And we're not the only ones. The same three authors plagiarized a
paper by French cryptographer Serge Vaudenay and others. And one of
my blog readers found a third plagiarized paper, and potentially a
fourth.
I wrote to the editor of the SIGCSE Bulletin, who removed the paper
from their website and demanded official letters of admission and
apology. They said that they would ban them from submitting again,
but have since backpedaled. Mark Mandelbaum, Director of the Office
of Publications at ACM, now says that ACM has no policy on plagiarism
and that nothing additional will be done. I've also written to
Springer-Verlag, the publisher of my original paper.
I don't blame the journals for letting these papers through. I've
refereed papers, and it's pretty much impossible to verify that a
piece of research is original. We're largely self-policing.
Mostly, the system works. These three have been found out, and should
be fired and/or expelled. Certainly ACM should ban them from
submitting anything, and I am very surprised at their claim that they
have no policy with regards to plagiarism. Academic plagiarism is
serious enough to warrant that level of response. I don't know if the
system works in Pakistan, though. I hope it does. These people knew
the risks when they did it. And then they did it again.
If I sound angry, I'm not. I'm more amused. I've heard of researchers
from developing countries resorting to plagiarism to pad their CVs,
but I'm surprised to see it happen to me. I mean, really; if they
were going to do this, wouldn't it have been smarter to pick a more
obscure author?
And it's nice to know that our work is still considered relevant
eight years later.
My paper:
<http://www.schneier.com/paper-relatedkey.html>
The plagiarized version:
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1041624.1041665>
Another paper:
<http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/php_code/publications/search.php?ref=CHVV03>
The plagiarized version:
<http://www.ansinet.org/fulltext/itj/itj33327-331.pdf>
A third paper:
<http://www.iki.fi/vph/files/rtp_security.pdf>
The plagiarized version:
<http://www.ansinet.org/fulltext/itj/itj33311-314.pdf>
The apologies are at the bottom of this page:
<http://www.schneier.com/paper-relatedkey-p.html>
There is a lot of discussion, much of it from students at the
International Islamic University, in the comments section of my blog
post:
<http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/08/plagiarism_and.html>
And there's some news about the incident. (Note that my name is
completely wrong.)
<http://www.onlinenews.com.pk/details.php?id=85519>
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