A New Thread-Aware Birthmark for Plagiarism Detection of Multithreaded Programs

Dynamic birthmarking used to be an effective approach to detecting software plagiarism. Yet the new trend towards multithreaded programming renders existing algorithms almost useless, due to the fact that thread scheduling nondeterminism severely perturbs birthmark generation and comparison. In this paper, we design a birthmark based on thread-related system calls. Such a birthmark is less susceptible to thread scheduling. The empirical study conducted on an open benchmark shows that the new birthmark is superior to existing birthmarks and is resilient against most state-of-the-art obfuscation techniques.