Beating Plagiarism Checkers for Science

Disclaimer: Plagiarism is bad. You will get caught; don’t do it.

The Declaration of Independence with a “Low risk of Plagiarism”

TLDR; a custom font can be used to avoid a plagiarism checker while still being human readable.

Edit: I took this a step further in my article Next Level Font Obfuscation check it out if you want to see the future of font manipulation.

Automated plagiarism checkers are becoming increasingly popular in education. These plagiarism checkers work by comparing submissions against a database of websites/previous submissions/other text sources. In education, these are used to prevent students from copying and pasting without citing their sources.

Question: How can I beat an automated plagiarism checker?

There are a bunch of existing ways to defeat a plagiarism checker such as paraphrasing, submitting images of the paper, and other lame low-tech tactics. I wanted to find a novel way to exploit the system that's checking for plagiarism. That's when I realized there's no reason for a letter to look the way it does. In other words, the letter “A” only looks like an “A” because that’s how my font drew it.

Answer: Using a custom font we can make a letter look like a different letter to trick a plagiarism checker while still being human-readable.

Now that I have a theory on defeating a plagiarism checker, its time to see if it works.

Step 1 is to create a custom font. I downloaded and installed High-Logic’s font creator found here.

Step 2 is to start a new project by going to File -> New

Creating a new font with the default values

Step 3 is to open a font to reorder by going to File -> Open Installed Font. In my case, I selected Arial Regular.

Step 4 is to copy letters over from your installed font to your new font but to change up their order. In my case, I am going to reverse each letter making a -> z, b -> y, etc. (Don’t forget the uppercase letters as well)

My reordered font where my letter “a” looks like the letter “z”

Step 5 is to export the font with File -> Export Font -> Export All Formats.

Step 6 is to install the font by double-clicking the .ttf file and pressing install.

My new cool-looking font.

Now I can open the font in whatever text editor and reverse my alphabet. In my case, the text “hvool dliow” displays as “hello world”. There is a red squiggly because “hvool dliow” is not a real word (which is why it won’t be detected by a plagiarism checker) To make this substitution easier I use this.

Now the biggest issue with this is that the font only exists locally. An easy workaround to this is to save/submit the file as a pdf. To test this, I submitted an example document (found here) to Scribbr which uses turnitin.com underneath the hood. The example document has a “Low risk of Plagiarism” despite being the Declaration of Independence verbatim. If you copy and paste from this example pdf you can see there is just gibberish underneath.

The Declaration of Independence with a “Low risk of Plagiarism”

Did you know you can clap an article up to 50 times? Feel free to experiment with this post ;)

While bypassing a plagiarism checker is a clickbaity way to use this type of custom font, it has many more useful applications that could be further researched. Some applications that come to mind are

1. Making plagiarism harder the because the document only copys gibberish
2. Stopping a bot from scraping an email address on a website
3. Obfuscating a website’s content (who says you can only use one font)
4. Making a phishing link look like a trusted link (medium.com -> eviler.com)
5. Creating a cool ctf problem

Join the discussion — please comment your thoughts:)

Edit:

I took this a step further in my article Next Level Font Obfuscation check it out if you want to see the future of font manipulation.