  Authorship Identification techniques are used to identify the most
appropriate author from group of potential suspects of online messages and find
evidences to support the conclusion. Cybercriminals make misuse of online
communication for sending blackmail or a spam email and then attempt to hide
their true identities to void detection.Authorship Identification of online
messages is the contemporary research issue for identity tracing in cyber
forensics. This is highly interdisciplinary area as it takes advantage of
machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing. In
this paper, a study of recent techniques and automated approaches to
attributing authorship of online messages is presented. The focus of this
review study is to summarize all existing authorship identification techniques
used in literature to identify authors of online messages. Also it discusses
evaluation criteria and parameters for authorship attribution studies and list
open questions that will attract future work in this area.
