Wired is reporting on a presentation given at Def Con 26 by Rachel Greenstadt, an associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, Greenstadt's former PhD student and now an assistant professor at George Washington University, entitled Even Anonymous Coders Leave Fingerprints. Stylistic expression is uniquely identifiable and not anonymous, that includes code especially. There are privacy implications for many developers because as few as 50 metrics are needed to distinguish one coder from another.
The researchers don't rely on low-level features, like how code was formatted. Instead, they create "abstract syntax trees," which reflect code's underlying structure, rather than its arbitrary components. Their technique is akin to prioritizing someone's sentence structure, instead of whether they indent each line in a paragraph.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @03:31PM (2 children)
It's a catchy phrase, but fingerprints are obviously more uniquely identifiable. If you want to go all CSI/Forensics, a much closer analogy is tool marks... or bullet ballistics.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 13 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
Go easy on that ballistics nonsense. You'll end up triggering someone!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @03:46PM
Don't worry you get triggered enough for everyone.
*STAND DOWN SJW HIT SQUAD!*