Source Code Authorship Analysis For Supporting the Cybercrime Investigation Process

Abstract

Nowadays, in a wide variety of situations, source code authorship identification has become an issue of major concern. Such situations include authorship disputes, proof of authorship in court, cyber attacks in the form of viruses, trojan horses, logic bombs, fraud, and credit card cloning. Source code author identification deals with the task of identifying the most likely author of a computer program, given a set of predefined author candidates. We present a new approach, called the SCAP (Source Code Author Profiles) approach, based on byte-level n-grams in order to represent a source code author’s style. Experiments on data sets of different programming-language (Java,C++ and Common Lisp) and varying difficulty (6 to 30 candidate authors) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. A comparison with a previous source code authorship identification study based on more complicated information shows that the SCAP approach is language independent and that n-gram author profiles are better able to capture the idiosyncrasies of the source code authors. It is also demonstrated that the effectiveness of the proposed model is not affected by the absence of comments in the source code, a condition usually met in cyber-crime cases.