A Method of Detecting Program Plagiarism Based on Variable Dependence

Program similarity means how similar comparable programs are by the computer-assisted analysis, with the aim to find equivalent code fragments. In this paper, we propose a semantic approach to detect program plagiarism by the computation of program similarity based on variable dependence. To do so, we compute dependence over program variables, find a variable mapping which maps a variable in a program to its counterpart in another program, then convert a program with the mapping into a version with can be compared in textual manner with another program, and thus compute the similarity of programs. An experiment is given to show the effectiveness of this method.