Coding Styles Survive Binary Compilation, Could Lead Investigators Back To Programmers (princeton.edu)

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @02:53AM from the making-a-list-and-checking-it-twice dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have created an algorithm that can accurately detect code written by different programmers (PDF), even if the code has been compiled into an executable binary. Because of open source coding repositories like GitHub, state agencies can build a database of all developers and their coding styles, and then easily compare the coding style used in "anti-establishment" software to detect the culprit. Despite all the privacy implications this research may have, the algorithm can also be used by security researchers to track down malware authors. We also discussed an earlier phase of this research.

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Re:I doubt this by Lab+Rat+Jason · 2015-12-30 03:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

This is why I steal most of my functional code from GitHub in the first place...
--OR--
Easy to avoid detection by simply NOT UPLOADING code to GitHub in the first place. The assumption that every dev does this is stupid.

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Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Re:Frist! by ShanghaiBill · 2015-12-30 07:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

False positives are not a problem if you deal with them rationally. If a woman is murdered, and the DNA matches one in a million, then in a country of 300 million, there will be 300 matches, and 299 false positives. But if only one lives in the same city, and it happens to be her ex-boyfriend, then the DNA match is useful information.