A Plagiarism Detection Technique for Java Program Using Bytecode Analysis

Most plagiarism detection systems evaluate the similarity of source codes and detect plagiarized program pairs. If we use the source codes in plagiarism detection, the source code security can be a significant problem. Plagiarism detection based on target code can be used for protecting the security of source codes. In this paper, we propose anew plagiarism detection technique for Java programs using bytecodes without referring their source codes. The plagiarism detection procedure using bytecode consists of two major steps. First, we generate the token sequences from the Java class file by analyzing the code area of methods. Then, we evaluate the similarity between token sequences using the adaptive local alignment. According to the experimental results, we can find the distributions of similarities of the source codes and that of bytecodes are very similar. Also, the correlation between the similarities of source code pairs and those of bytecode pairs is high enough for typical test data. The plagiarism detection system using bytecode can be used as a preliminary verifying tool before detecting the plagiarism by source code comparison.