I Can Find You in Seconds! Leveraging Large Language Models for Code Authorship Attribution

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08165v1
• Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2025 14:46:19 GMT
• Title: I Can Find You in Seconds! Leveraging Large Language Models for Code Authorship Attribution
• Authors: Soohyeon Choi, Yong Kiam Tan, Mark Huasong Meng, Mohamed Ragab, Soumik Mondal, David Mohaisen, Khin Mi Mi Aung,
• Abstract summary: State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can successfully attribute source code authorship across different languages. LLMs show some adversarial robustness against misattribution attacks. We propose a tournament-style approach for large-scale attribution.
• Score: 10.538442986619147
• License:
• Abstract: Source code authorship attribution is important in software forensics, plagiarism detection, and protecting software patch integrity. Existing techniques often rely on supervised machine learning, which struggles with generalization across different programming languages and coding styles due to the need for large labeled datasets. Inspired by recent advances in natural language authorship analysis using large language models (LLMs), which have shown exceptional performance without task-specific tuning, this paper explores the use of LLMs for source code authorship attribution. We present a comprehensive study demonstrating that state-of-the-art LLMs can successfully attribute source code authorship across different languages. LLMs can determine whether two code snippets are written by the same author with zero-shot prompting, achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.78, and can attribute code authorship from a small set of reference code snippets via few-shot learning, achieving MCC of 0.77. Additionally, LLMs show some adversarial robustness against misattribution attacks. Despite these capabilities, we found that naive prompting of LLMs does not scale well with a large number of authors due to input token limitations. To address this, we propose a tournament-style approach for large-scale attribution. Evaluating this approach on datasets of C++ (500 authors, 26,355 samples) and Java (686 authors, 55,267 samples) code from GitHub, we achieve classification accuracy of up to 65% for C++ and 68.7% for Java using only one reference per author. These results open new possibilities for applying LLMs to code authorship attribution in cybersecurity and software engineering.

Related papers

• A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution [57.309390098903]
  Authorship attribution aims to identify the origin or author of a document. Large Language Models (LLMs) with their deep reasoning capabilities and ability to maintain long-range textual associations offer a promising alternative. Our results on the IMDb and blog datasets show an impressive 85% accuracy in one-shot authorship classification across ten authors.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-29T04:14:23Z)
• Large Language Models as Code Executors: An Exploratory Study [29.545321608864295]
  This paper pioneers the exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) as code executors. We are the first to examine this feasibility across various LLMs, including OpenAI's o1, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, DeepSeek, and Qwen-Coder. We introduce an Iterative Instruction Prompting (IIP) technique that processes code snippets line by line, enhancing the accuracy of weaker models by an average of 7.22%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-09T08:23:22Z)
• Large Language Models for cross-language code clone detection [3.5202378300682162]
  Cross-lingual code clone detection has gained traction within the software engineering community. Inspired by the significant advances in machine learning, this paper revisits cross-lingual code clone detection. We evaluate the performance of five (05) Large Language Models (LLMs) and eight prompts (08) for the identification of cross-lingual code clones.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-08T12:57:14Z)
• VersiCode: Towards Version-controllable Code Generation [58.82709231906735]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have made tremendous strides in code generation, but existing research fails to account for the dynamic nature of software development. We propose two novel tasks aimed at bridging this gap: version-specific code completion (VSCC) and version-aware code migration (VACM) We conduct an extensive evaluation on VersiCode, which reveals that version-controllable code generation is indeed a significant challenge.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-11T16:15:06Z)
• CodecLM: Aligning Language Models with Tailored Synthetic Data [51.59223474427153]
  We introduce CodecLM, a framework for adaptively generating high-quality synthetic data for instruction-following abilities. We first encode seed instructions into metadata, which are concise keywords generated on-the-fly to capture the target instruction distribution. We also introduce Self-Rubrics and Contrastive Filtering during decoding to tailor data-efficient samples.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-08T21:15:36Z)
• Assured LLM-Based Software Engineering [51.003878077888686]
  This paper is an outline of the content of the keynote by Mark Harman at the International Workshop on Interpretability, Robustness, and Benchmarking in Neural Software Engineering, Monday 15th April 2024, Lisbon, Portugal.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-06T20:38:46Z)
• Bridging Code Semantic and LLMs: Semantic Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Code Generation [22.219645213202178]
  This paper proposes the "Semantic Chain-of-Thought" approach to intruduce semantic information of code, named SeCoT. We show that SeCoT can achieves state-of-the-art performance, greatly improving the potential for large models and code generation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-16T05:09:58Z)
• Large Language Model-Aware In-Context Learning for Code Generation [75.68709482932903]
  Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive in-context learning (ICL) ability in code generation. We propose a novel learning-based selection approach named LAIL (LLM-Aware In-context Learning) for code generation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-15T06:12:58Z)
• The potential of LLMs for coding with low-resource and domain-specific programming languages [0.0]
  This study focuses on the econometric scripting language named hansl of the open-source software gretl. Our findings suggest that LLMs can be a useful tool for writing, understanding, improving, and documenting gretl code.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-24T17:17:13Z)
• LLMDet: A Third Party Large Language Models Generated Text Detection Tool [119.0952092533317]
  Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably close to high-quality human-authored text. Existing detection tools can only differentiate between machine-generated and human-authored text. We propose LLMDet, a model-specific, secure, efficient, and extendable detection tool.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-24T10:45:16Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.