Source Code Plagiarism Detection Based on Abstract Syntax Tree Fingerprintings

Abstract

Syntax Tree (AST) is an abstract logical structure of source code represented as a tree. This research utilizes information of fingerprinting with AST to locate the similarities between source codes. The proposed method can detect plagiarism in source codes using the number of duplicated logical structures. The structural information of program is stored in the fingerprints format. Then, the fingerprints of source codes are compared to identify number of similar nodes. The final output is calculated from number of similar nodes known as similarities scores. The result shows that the proposed method accurately captures the common modification techniques from basic to advance.