Abstract
Detecting instances of software theft and plagiarism is a difficult problem. The
statistical analysis of peculiar words or phrases known to be used by an author
is a common method of settling authorship disputes in English literature. This
paper presents a similar method for identifying authorship of programs. The
method is based on typographic or layout style program characteristics. Our
experiments show that these characteristics can be useful in determining
authorship. The major benifits of the method are that it is simple, easy to
automate, and can be used in conjunction with other program fingerprinting
methodologies.
Keywords
Programming style, coding style, style analysis, typographic style, authorship identification, plagiarism detection.
