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posted by chromas on Monday August 13 2018, @02:22PM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by ikanreed on Monday August 13 2018, @04:42PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 13 2018, @04:42PM (#721036) Journal

    I was trying to joke about what it seems like every coder does. I knew when I was posting it it was a kinda limp joke. Didn't realize it was so flaccid as to be unrecognizable.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 13 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday August 13 2018, @04:59PM (#721042) Journal

    The problem is that somebody is going to end up reading this [ic.ac.uk] and consider it a legit strategy for writing anonymous code.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:47PM (#721383)

      omg I love that!!!