DuCodeMark: Dual-Purpose Code Dataset Watermarking via Style-Aware Watermark-Poison Design
The proliferation of large language models for code (CodeLMs) and open-source contributions has heightened concerns over unauthorized use of source code datasets. While watermarking provides a viable protection mechanism by embedding ownership signals, existing methods rely on detectable trigger-target patterns and are limited to source-code tasks, overlooking other scenarios such as decompilation tasks. In this paper, we propose DuCodeMark, a stealthy and robust dual-purpose watermarking method for code datasets that generalizes across both source-code tasks and decompilation tasks. DuCodeMark parses each code sample into an abstract syntax tree (AST), applies language-specific style transformations to construct stealthy trigger-target pairs, and injects repressible poisoned features into a subset of return-typed samples to enhance robustness against watermark removal or evasion. These features remain inactive during normal training but are activated upon watermark removal, degrading model performance. For verification, DuCodeMark employs a black-box method based on the independent-samples t -test. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of DuCodeMark across 72 settings spanning two code tasks, two programming languages, three CodeLMs, and six decoding temperatures. The results demonstrate that it consistently achieves strong verifiability ( p < 0.05), high stealthiness (suspicion rate ≤ 0.36), robustness against both watermark and poisoning attacks (recall ≤ 0.57), and a substantial drop in model performance upon watermark removal (Pass@1 drops by 28.6
Authors
- Chunrong Fang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9930-7111)
- Baowen Xu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7743-1296)
- Zhenyu Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9592-7022)
- Yuchen Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3380-5564)
- Yuan Xiao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3166-8007)
Institutions
- Nanjing University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.
- Published
- 2026-06-30
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3797076
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China