From Whence It Came: Detecting Source Code Clones by Analyzing Assembler

Authors: Ian J. Davis Michael W. Godfrey

Venue: SANER   2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, pp. 242-246, 2010

Year: 2010

Abstract: To date, most clone detection techniques have concentrated on various forms of source code analysis, often by analyzing token streams. In this paper, we introduce a complementary technique of analyzing generated assembler for clones. This approach is appealing as it is mostly impervious to trivial changes in the source, with compilation serving as a kind of normalization technique. We have built detectors to analyze both Java VM code as well as GCC Linux assembler for C and C++. In the paper, we describe our approach and show how it can serve as a valuable complementary semantic approach to syntactic source code based detection.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{ianj.davis2010fwicdsccbaa,
    author = "Ian J. Davis and Michael W. Godfrey",
    title = "From Whence It Came: Detecting Source Code Clones by Analyzing Assembler",
    year = "2010",
    pages = "242-246",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of 2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering"
}

Plain Text:

Ian J. Davis and Michael W. Godfrey, "From Whence It Came: Detecting Source Code Clones by Analyzing Assembler," 2010 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, pp. 242-246