Software plagiarism detection via the static API call frequency birthmark

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a system for detecting software plagiarism using a birthmark. The birthmark is representative features of a program, which can be used to identify the program. We use a set of frequency of APIs used in a program as its birthmark. The proposed system consists of three components. First, it extracts the frequency of APIs employed in a program. Next, it generates the program birthmark using a set of frequency of APIs and weights to APIs to extract unique features of the program. Finally, it decides the plagiarism based on the cosine similarity between the birthmarks. Through extensive experiments, it was found that the proposed system can provide 97.2% of precision and 95.7% of recall in plagiarism detection.