CPLAG: Efficient plagiarism detection using bitwise operations

Abstract

Source code plagiarism in an academic environment is a serious concern of faculties. The paper presents an efficient plagiarism detection tool, CPLAG, for C programming language codes. The tool assesses the structure of the C programs based on a set of attributes and performs a binary encoding of the C code statements. Subsequently, it utilizes computationally inexpensive bitwise operations to detect similarity between the given C programs. The design of CPLAG considers the commonly used techniques to avoid detection of plagiarism for delivering an efficient performance. Moreover, it avoids the extensive computations as used by existing tools for plagiarism detection. Experiment results indicate that CPLAG can detect plagiarism with accuracy. The tool finds application in academic institutions for fair and efficient automatic evaluation and grading of programming assignments.