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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: 2) by Bot on Monday August 13 2018, @07:20PM

    by Bot (3902) on Monday August 13 2018, @07:20PM (#721109) Journal

    - see here, the cracker worked all night, had installed a firmware backdoor, had booted the cracked workstation onto the corporate network, had deployed his payload. The change was of course logged so we could give a look at it. The code was obfuscated, and we have a hunch that it was compiled, then reverse engineered and recompiled on a different tool, all of it of course with aggressive optimization flags. A real mess.
    - so he got away with it?
    - no we got an ID at the police station by noon.
    - wow, did they see through all that obfuscation?
    - kinda. The guy left his fingerprints on the keyboard.

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