Can conference papers use the original words in published papers?

Question

Conference papers are often only about 10 pages. When I was writing conference papers, some words seemed unnatural. Can I directly use the original words in someone else's paper? Not a conclusion or opinion. For example:

In this paper, we investigate and present a new type of hardware vulnerability to covert timing channels exposed by [Other people's methods]

I changed it to mine in the thesis:

In this paper, we investigate and present a new type of hardware vulnerability to covert timing channels exposed by others + [my method]

Is this feasible? I just used its sentences to express my idea

Answer 1

I think you can. Some sentences will inevitably be the same in multiple papers. This is, in my eyes, not necessarily plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking "someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own". What you are doing here is taking somebody else's words that describe work or ideas and passing them off as your own.

That said, in a case like this there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't just change the sentence to avoid any perception of plagiarism. For example:

Past methods have exposed a new type of hardware vulnerability to covert timing channels [REFs]. Using 'my method' we investigated such vulnerabilities and present them in this work.