<story><title>De-Anonymizing Programmers via Code Stylometry (2015) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-caliskan-islam.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdhzy</author><text>Looks impressive, now only one question remains: did you find out what is the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto?</text></item><item><author>randomwalker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a coauthor of this paper. It was published a couple of years ago; pleasantly surprised to see it here.&lt;p&gt;The paper shows that programmers have distinctive styles in their source code that can be extracted to create a fingerprint of coding style. It&amp;#x27;s not just the obvious stuff like spaces vs. tabs -- parsing the code and looking at the Abstract Syntax Tree is what results in a powerful fingerprint.&lt;p&gt;We have a follow-up to this paper showing that surprisingly, coding style survives in compiled binaries (even with optimization turned on and debugging symbols removed): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.princeton.edu&amp;#x2F;~aylinc&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;caliskan-islam_when.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.princeton.edu&amp;#x2F;~aylinc&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;caliskan-islam_when...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>randomwalker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been asked this a lot, especially since I also research and teach cryptocurrency technology [1]. I haven&amp;#x27;t personally tried to do that. Satoshi clearly wished to maintain their pseudonymity, and I&amp;#x27;d rather respect that. I also think Satoshi&amp;#x27;s pseudonymity is a powerful statement about decentralized cryptocurrencies, namely that their viability rests on their technical merits, with no need to know or trust their creators.&lt;p&gt;That said, I don&amp;#x27;t blame people for trying to uncover Satoshi&amp;#x27;s identity, and it&amp;#x27;s possible that the techniques in our paper can help. The big caveat, of course, is access to a corpus that includes Satoshi&amp;#x27;s code labeled with their true identity.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;randomwalker.info&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;randomwalker.info&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>De-Anonymizing Programmers via Code Stylometry (2015) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-caliskan-islam.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdhzy</author><text>Looks impressive, now only one question remains: did you find out what is the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto?</text></item><item><author>randomwalker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a coauthor of this paper. It was published a couple of years ago; pleasantly surprised to see it here.&lt;p&gt;The paper shows that programmers have distinctive styles in their source code that can be extracted to create a fingerprint of coding style. It&amp;#x27;s not just the obvious stuff like spaces vs. tabs -- parsing the code and looking at the Abstract Syntax Tree is what results in a powerful fingerprint.&lt;p&gt;We have a follow-up to this paper showing that surprisingly, coding style survives in compiled binaries (even with optimization turned on and debugging symbols removed): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.princeton.edu&amp;#x2F;~aylinc&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;caliskan-islam_when.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.princeton.edu&amp;#x2F;~aylinc&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;caliskan-islam_when...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xdeadbeefbabe</author><text>Is it one person or many people who wrote that code?  I think it is one, but stylometry probably knows better.</text></comment>