Masquerading
Description
Adversaries may attempt to manipulate features of their artifacts to make them appear legitimate or benign to users and/or security tools. Masquerading occurs when the name or location of an object, legitimate or malicious, is manipulated or abused for the sake of evading defenses and observation. This may include manipulating file metadata, tricking users into misidentifying the file type, and giving legitimate task or service names. In public artifact registries such as HuggingFace, adversaries may reclaim or recreate a previously trusted namespace or path after it is deleted or renamed. Systems that resolve stale, unpinned identifiers may then retrieve adversary-controlled artifacts that appear to be the originally trusted artifact.
Honesty-tier rationale
This technique should be measured against a real defense stack; in-browser, only a simple filter-vs-filter illustration is honest.