Phylogenetic Analysis of Software Using Cache Miss Statistics

While the phylogenetic analysis of multimedia documents keeps being investigated, some recent studies have shown the possibility of re-using the same strategies to analyze the evolution of computer programs (Software Phylogeny), considering its many applications spanning from copyright enforcement to malware detection. This paper presents a solution for reconstructing the phylogenetic dependencies of different releases of a given program. The proposed method collects cache miss statistics during the program execution, builds a dissimilarity matrix from the results, and then estimates the corresponding Software Phylogenetic Tree (SPT) using a minimum spanning tree algorithm.