Large-Scale And Language-Oblivious Code Authorship Identification

Keywords

Code Authorship Identiication; Deep learning identiication; Program features; Software forensics

Abstract

Eicient extraction of code authorship attributes is key for successful identiication. However, the extraction of such attributes is very challenging, due to various programming language speciics, the limited number of available code samples per author, and the average code lines per ile, among others. To this end, this work proposes a Deep Learning-based Code Authorship Identiication System (DL-CAIS) for code authorship attribution that facilitates large-scale, language-oblivious, and obfuscation-resilient code authorship identiication. The deep learning architecture adopted in this work includes TF-IDF-based deep representation using multiple Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) layers and fully-connected layers dedicated to authorship attribution learning. The deep representation then feeds into a random forest classiier for scalability to de-anonymize the author. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate DL-CAIS over the entire Google Code Jam (GCJ) dataset across all years (from 2008 to 2016) and over real-world code samples from 1987 public repositories on GitHub. The results of our work show the high accuracy despite requiring a smaller number of iles per author. Namely, we achieve an accuracy of 96% when experimenting with 1,600 authors for GCJ, and 94.38% for the real-world dataset for 745 C programmers. Our system also allows us to identify 8,903 authors, the largest-scale dataset used by far, with an accuracy of 92.3%. Moreover, our technique is resilient to language-speciics, and thus it can identify authors of four programming languages (e.g., C, C++, Java, and Python), and authors writing in mixed languages (e.g., Java/C++, Python/C++). Finally, our system is resistant to sophisticated obfuscation (e.g., using C Tigress) with an accuracy of 93.42% for a set of 120 authors.

Publication Date

10-15-2018

Publication Title

Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Number of Pages

101-114

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3243734.3243738

Socpus ID

85056906258 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85056906258

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