ASAP: A Source Code Authorship Program

Abstract

Source code authorship attribution is the task of determining who wrote a computer program, based on its source code, usually when the author is either unknown or under dispute. Areas where this can be applied include software forensics, cases of software copyright infringement, and detecting plagiarism. Numerous methods of source code authorship attribution have been proposed and studied. However, there are no known easily accessible and user-friendly programs that perform this task. Instead, researchers typically develop software in an ad hoc manner for use in their studies, and the software is rarely made publicly available. In this paper, we present a software tool called A Source Code Authorship Program (ASAP), which is suitable to be used by either the layperson or the expert. An author can be attributed to individual documents one at a time, or complex authorship attribution experiments can easily be performed on large datasets. In this paper, the interface and implementation of the ASAP tool is presented, and the tool is validated by using it to replicate previously published authorship attribution experiments.