The System Kato: Detecting Cases of Plagiarism for Answer-Set Programs

Plagiarism detection is a growing need among educational institutions and solutions for different purposes exist. An important field in this direction is detecting cases of source-code plagiarism. In this paper, we present the tool Kato for supporting the detection of this kind of plagiarism in the area of answer-set programming (ASP). Currently, the tool is implemented for DLV programs but it is designed to handle other logic-programming dialects as well. We review the basic features of Kato, introduce its theoretical underpinnings, and discuss an application of Kato for plagiarism detection in the context of courses on logic programming at the Vienna University of Technology

Neural Machine Translation Inspired Binary Code Similarity Comparison beyond Function Pairs

Binary code analysis allows analyzing binary code without having access to the corresponding source code. A binary, after disassembly, is expressed in an assembly language. This inspires us to approach binary analysis by leveraging ideas and techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a rich area focused on processing text of various natural languages. We notice that binary code analysis and NLP share a lot of analogical topics, such as semantics extraction, summarization, and classification. This work utilizes these ideas to address two important code similarity comparison problems. (I) Given a pair of basic blocks for different instruction set architectures (ISAs), determining whether their semantics is similar or not; and (II) given a piece of code of interest, determining if it is contained in another piece of assembly code for a different ISA. The solutions to these two problems have many applications, such as cross-architecture vulnerability discovery and code plagiarism detection. We implement a prototype system INNEREYE and perform a comprehensive evaluation. A comparison between our approach and existing approaches to Problem I shows that our system outperforms them in terms of accuracy, efficiency and scalability. And the case studies utilizing the system demonstrate that our solution to Problem II is effective. Moreover, this research showcases how to apply ideas and techniques from NLP to large-scale binary code analysis.Comment: Accepted by Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 201

An Extended Stable Marriage Problem Algorithm for Clone Detection

Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 6 table

TF-IDF Inspired Detection for Cross-Language Source Code Plagiarism and Collusion

Several computing courses allow students to choose which programming language they want to use for completing a programming task. This can lead to cross-language code plagiarism and collusion, in which the copied code file is rewritten in another programming language. In response to that, this paper proposes a detection technique which is able to accurately compare code files written in various programming languages, but with limited effort in accommodating such languages at development stage. The only language-dependent feature used in the technique is source code tokeniser and no code conversion is applied. The impact of coincidental similarity is reduced by applying a TF-IDF inspired weighting, in which rare matches are prioritised. Our evaluation shows that the technique outperforms common techniques in academia for handling language conversion disguises. Further, it is comparable to those techniques when dealing with conventional disguises

CroLSSim: Cross‐language software similarity detector using hybrid approach of LSA‐based AST‐MDrep features and CNN‐LSTM model

Software similarity in different programming codes is a rapidly evolving field because of its numerous applications in software development, software cloning, software plagiarism, and software forensics. Currently, software researchers and developers search cross-language open-source repositories for similar applications for a variety of reasons, such as reusing programming code, analyzing different implementations, and looking for a better application. However, it is a challenging task because each programming language has a unique syntax and semantic structure. In this paper, a novel tool called Cross-Language Software Similarity (CroLSSim) is designed to detect similar software applications written in different programming codes. First, the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) features are collected from different programming codes. These are high-quality features that can show the abstract view of each program. Then, Methods Description (MDrep) in combination with AST is used to examine the relationship among different method calls. Second, the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency approach is used to retrieve the local and global weights from AST-MDrep features. Third, the Latent Semantic Analysis-based features extraction and selection method is proposed to extract the semantic anchors in reduced dimensional space. Fourth, the Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based features extraction method is proposed to mine the deep features. Finally, a hybrid deep learning model of CNN-Long-Short-Term Memory is designed to detect semantically similar software applications from these latent variables. The data set contains approximately 9.5K Java, 8.8K C#, and 7.4K C++ software applications obtained from GitHub. The proposed approach outperforms as compared with the state-of-the-art methods

On the detection of SOurce COde re-use

© {Owner/Author | ACM} {2014}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in FIRE '14 Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2824864.2824878"This paper summarizes the goals, organization and results of the first SOCO competitive evaluation campaign for systems that automatically detect the source code re-use phenomenon. The detection of source code re-use is an important research field for both software industry and academia fields. Accordingly, PAN@FIRE track, named SOurce COde Re-use (SOCO) focused on the detection of re-used source codes in C/C++ and Java programming languages. Participant systems were asked to annotate several source codes whether or not they represent cases of source code re-use. In total five teams submitted 17 runs. The training set consisted of annotations made by several experts, a feature which turns the SOCO 2014 collection in a useful data set for future evaluations and, at the same time, it establishes a standard evaluation framework for future research works on the posed shared task.PAN@FIRE (SOCO) has been organised in the framework of WIQ-EI (EC IRSES grantn. 269180) and DIANA-APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02- 01) research projects. The work of the last author was supported by CONACyT Mexico Project Grant CB-2010/153315, and SEP-PROMEP UAM-PTC-380/48510349.Flores Sáez, E.; Rosso, P.; Moreno Boronat, LA.; Villatoro-Tello, E. (2014). On the detection of SOurce COde re-use. En FIRE '14 Proceedings of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation. ACM. 21-30. https://doi.org/10.1145/2824864.2824878S2130C. Arwin and S. Tahaghoghi. Plagiarism detection across programming languages. Proceedings of the 29th Australian Computer Science Conference, Australian Computer Society, 48:277--286, 2006.N. Baer and R. Zeidman. Measuring whitespace pattern sequence as an indication of plagiarism. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 5(4):249--254, 2012.M. Chilowicz, E. Duris, and G. Roussel. Syntax tree fingerprinting for source code similarity detection. In Program Comprehension, 2009. ICPC '09. IEEE 17th International Conference on, pages 243--247, 2009.D. Chuda, P. Navrat, B. Kovacova, and P. Humay. The issue of (software) plagiarism: A student view. Education, IEEE Transactions on, 55(1):22--28, 2012.G. Cosma and M. Joy. Evaluating the performance of lsa for source-code plagiarism detection. Informatica, 36(4):409--424, 2013.B. Cui, J. Li, T. Guo, J. Wang, and D. Ma. Code comparison system based on abstract syntax tree. In Broadband Network and Multimedia Technology (IC-BNMT), 3rd IEEE International Conference on, pages 668--673, Oct 2010.J. A. W. Faidhi and S. K. Robinson. An empirical approach for detecting program similarity and plagiarism within a university programming environment. Comput. Educ., 11(1):11--19, Jan. 1987.Fire, editor. FIRE 2014 Working Notes. Sixth International Workshop of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, Bangalore, India, 5--7 December, 2014.J. L. Fleiss. Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychological bulletin, 76(5):378, 1971.E. Flores, A. Barrón-Cedeño, L. Moreno, and P. Rosso. Uncovering source code reuse in large-scale academic environments. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, pages n/a--n/a, 2014.E. Flores, A. Barrón-Cedeño, P. Rosso, and L. Moreno. DeSoCoRe: Detecting source code re-use across programming languages. In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstration Session, NAACL-HLT, pages 1--4. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012.E. Flores, A. Barrón-Cedeño, P. Rosso, and L. Moreno. Towards the Detection of Cross-Language Source Code Reuse. Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB-2011, Springer-Verlag, LNCS(6716), pages 250--253, 2011.E. Flores, M. Ibarra-Romero, L. Moreno, G. Sidorov, and P. Rosso. Modelos de recuperación de información basados en n-gramas aplicados a la reutilización de código fuente. In Proc. 3rd Spanish Conf. on Information Retrieval, pages 185--188, 2014.D. Ganguly and G. J. Jones. Dcu@ fire-2014: an information retrieval approach for source code plagiarism detection. In Fire [8].R. García-Hernández and Y. Lendeneva. Identification of similar source codes based on longest common substrings. In Fire [8].M. Joy and M. Luck. Plagiarism in programming assignments. Education, IEEE Transactions on, 42(2):129--133, May 1999.A. Marcus, A. Sergeyev, V. Rajlich, and J. Maletic. An information retrieval approach to concept location in source code. In Reverse Engineering, 2004. Proceedings. 11th Working Conference on, pages 214--223, Nov 2004.S. Narayanan and S. Simi. Source code plagiarism detection and performance analysis using fingerprint based distance measure method. In Proc. of 7th International Conference on Computer Science Education, ICCSE '12, pages 1065--1068, July 2012.M. Potthast, M. Hagen, A. Beyer, M. Busse, M. Tippmann, P. Rosso, and B. Stein. Overview of the 6th international competition on plagiarism detection. In L. Cappellato, N. Ferro, M. Halvey, and W. Kraaij, editors, Working Notes for CLEF 2014 Conference, Sheffield, UK, September 15-18, 2014., volume 1180 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pages 845--876. CEUR-WS.org, 2014.L. Prechelt, G. Malpohl, and M. Philippsen. Finding plagiarisms among a set of programs with JPlag. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 8(11):1016--1038, 2002.I. Rahal and C. Wielga. 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Structural analysis of source code plagiarism using graphs

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. May 2017Plagiarism is a serious problem in academia. It is prevalent in the computing discipline where students are expected to submit source code assignments as part of their assessment; hence, there is every likelihood of copying. Ideally, students can collaborate with each other to perform a programming task, but it is expected that each student submit his/her own solution for the programming task. More so, one might conclude that the interaction would make them learn programming. Unfortunately, that may not always be the case. In undergraduate courses, especially in the computer sciences, if a given class is large, it would be unfeasible for an instructor to manually check each and every assignment for probable plagiarism. Even if the class size were smaller, it is still impractical to inspect every assignment for likely plagiarism because some potentially plagiarised content could still be missed by humans. Therefore, automatically checking the source code programs for likely plagiarism is essential. There have been many proposed methods that attempt to detect source code plagiarism in undergraduate source code assignments but, an ideal system should be able to differentiate actual cases of plagiarism from coincidental similarities that usually occur in source code plagiarism. Some of the existing source code plagiarism detection systems are either not scalable, or performed better when programs are modified with a number of insertions and deletions to obfuscate plagiarism. To address this issue, a graph-based model which considers structural similarities of programs is introduced to address cases of plagiarism in programming assignments. This research study proposes an approach to measuring cases of similarities in programming assignments using an existing plagiarism detection system to find similarities in programs, and a graph-based model to annotate the programs. We describe experiments with data sets of undergraduate Java programs to inspect the programs for plagiarism and evaluate the graph-model with good precision. An evaluation of the graph-based model reveals a high rate of plagiarism in the programs and resilience to many obfuscation techniques, while false detection (coincident similarity) rarely occurred. If this detection method is adopted into use, it will aid an instructor to carry out the detection process conscientiously.MT 201

A systematic literature review on source code similarity measurement and clone detection: techniques, applications, and challenges

Measuring and evaluating source code similarity is a fundamental software engineering activity that embraces a broad range of applications, including but not limited to code recommendation, duplicate code, plagiarism, malware, and smell detection. This paper proposes a systematic literature review and meta-analysis on code similarity measurement and evaluation techniques to shed light on the existing approaches and their characteristics in different applications. We initially found over 10000 articles by querying four digital libraries and ended up with 136 primary studies in the field. The studies were classified according to their methodology, programming languages, datasets, tools, and applications. A deep investigation reveals 80 software tools, working with eight different techniques on five application domains. Nearly 49% of the tools work on Java programs and 37% support C and C++, while there is no support for many programming languages. A noteworthy point was the existence of 12 datasets related to source code similarity measurement and duplicate codes, of which only eight datasets were publicly accessible. The lack of reliable datasets, empirical evaluations, hybrid methods, and focuses on multi-paradigm languages are the main challenges in the field. Emerging applications of code similarity measurement concentrate on the development phase in addition to the maintenance.Comment: 49 pages, 10 figures, 6 table

Towards the detection of cross-language source code reuse

Internet has made available huge amounts of information, also source code. Source code repositories and, in general, programming related websites, facilitate its reuse. In this work, we propose a simple approach to the detection of cross-language source code reuse, a nearly investigated problem. Our preliminary experiments, based on character n-grams comparison, show that considering different sections of the code (i.e., comments, code, reserved words, etc.), leads to different results. When considering three programming languages: C++, Java, and Python, the best result is obtained when comments are discarded and the entire source code is considered.This work has been developed with the support of the project TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0: Text comprehension techniques applied to the needs of the Enterprise 2.0 (MICINN, Spain TIN2009-13391-C04-03 (PlanI+D+i)).Flores Sáez, E.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Rosso, P.; Moreno Boronat, LA. (2011). Towards the detection of cross-language source code reuse. En Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6716:250-253. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22327-3_31S2502536716Arwin, C., Tahaghoghi, S.M.M.: Plagiarism Detection across Programming Languages. In: Proceedings of the 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference, vol. 48, pp. 277–286 (2006)Faidhi, J., Robinson, S.: An empirical approach for detecting program similarity and plagiarism within a university programming environment. Comput. Educ. 11, 11–19 (1987)Jankowitz, H.T.: Detecting plagiarism in student pascal programs. The Computer Journal 31(1) (1988)Pinto, D., Civera, J., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Juan, A., Rosso, P.: A statistical approach to crosslingual natural language tasks. Journal of Algorithms 64(1), 51–60 (2009)Potthast, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection. Languages Resources and Evaluation. Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis 45(1) (2011)Rosales, F., García, A., Rodríguez, S., Pedraza, J.L., Méndez, R., Nieto, M.M.: Detection of plagiarism in programming assignments. IEEE Transactions on Education 51(2), 174–183 (2008)Stamatatos, E.: Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection Using Character n-gram Profiles. In: Proc. SEPLN 2009, Donostia, Spain, pp. 38–46 (2009