Identifying Authorship by Byte-Level N-Grams: The Source Code Author Profile (SCAP) Method

Source code author identification deals with identifying the most likely author of a computer program, given a set of predefined author candidates. There are several scenarios where digital evidence of this kind plays a role in investigation and adjudication, such as code authorship disputes, intellectual property infringement, tracing the source of code left in the system after a cyber attack, and so forth. As in any identification task, the disputed program is compared to undisputed, known programming samples by the predefined author candidates. We present a new approach, called the SCAP (Source Code Author Profiles) approach, based on byte-level n-gram profiles representing the source code author’s style. The SCAP method extends a method originally applied to natural language text authorship attribution; we show that an n-gram approach also suits the characteristics of source code analysis. The methodological extension includes a simplified profile and a less complicated, but mor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJDE
• Authors: Georgia Frantzeskou, Efstathios Stamatatos, Stefanos Gritzalis, Carole E. Chaski, Blake Stephen Howald
• Keywords: Author Candidates, IJDE 2007, Source Code, Source Code Author