Mitigating Obfuscation Attacks on Software Plagiarism Detectors via Subsequence Merging

Plagiarism is a significant challenge in computer science education. Thus, tool-based approaches are widely used to combat software plagiarism. However, especially due to the recent rise of automated obfuscation via algorithmic or AIbased techniques, these tools face difficulties due to increasingly sophisticated obfuscation techniques. To address this challenge, we present a novel defense mechanism against automated obfuscation attacks. This mechanism iteratively merges matching program subsequences to counteract the effects of the obfuscation. Our approach is language-independent, attack-agnostic, and integrates well into state-of-the-art software plagiarism detectors. The evaluation based on five real-world datasets indicates that our approach not only provides broader resilience against algorithmic and AI-based obfuscation attacks than the state-of-the-art but also improves the detection of fully AI-generated programs.