JPlag: Detecting Obfuscated Software Plagiarism using Token Normalization Graphs

Abstract

While software plagiarism detectors have been used for decades, the assumption that evading detection requires programming proficiency is challenged by the emergence of automated plagiarism generators. These generators enable effortless obfuscation attacks, exploiting vulnerabilities in existing detectors by inserting statements to disrupt the matching. We present a language-independent defense mechanism that leverages program dependence graphs, rendering such attacks infeasible. We evaluate our approach with multiple real-world datasets and show that it defeats plagiarism generators by offering resilience against automated obfuscation while maintaining a low rate of false positives.