The Software IP Detective’s Handbook: Measurement, Comparison, and Infringement Detection

12. Applications

Initially source code differentiation was developed as a quick and simple way to look for source code copying. Since then, other important uses have been found for it. In this chapter I discuss some of these applications, though others will certainly emerge in the future.

12.1 Finding Similar Code

The initial reason for the development of source code differentiation was to find code that had been copied with no changes or with an insignificant number of changes. Source code differentiation points the software forensic examiner to those files with high similarity values, which represent files with identical lines of code. There are a number of scenarios where source code differentiation can be used to find similar code as part ...