CPDP: a robust technique for plagiarism detection in source code

Abstract

The advent of internet and growth of open source software repositories has made source code readily accessible to software developers. Although, reusing of source code has its own advantages, care must be taken to ensure that proprietary software does not infringe any licenses. In this context, plagiarism detection plays an important role. In this paper, we propose a robust technique to detect plagiarism in source code. Our approach uses a language aware token representation, which is resilient to code transformations and an improved querying and matching technique to detect plagiarism in software code. We evaluated our approach by comparing it with other plagiarism detection tools - Copy Paste Detector (CPD), Sherlock, CCFinder and Plaggie.