Authorship Identification of Binary and Disassembled Codes Using NLP Methods

Abstract

This article is part of a series aimed at determining the authorship of source codes. Analyzing binary code is a crucial aspect of cybersecurity, software development, and computer forensics, particularly in identifying malware authors. Any program is machine code, which can be disassembled using specialized tools and analyzed for authorship identification, similar to natural language text using Natural Language Processing methods. We propose an ensemble of fastText, support vector machine (SVM), and the authors’ hybrid neural network developed in previous works in this research. The improved methodology was evaluated using a dataset of source codes written in C and C++ languages collected from GitHub and Google Code Jam. The collected source codes were compiled into executable programs and then disassembled using reverse engineering tools. The average accuracy of author identification for disassembled codes using the improved methodology exceeds 0.90. Additionally, the methodology was tested on the source codes, achieving an average accuracy of 0.96 in simple cases and over 0.85 in complex cases. These results validate the effectiveness of the developed methodology and its applicability to solving cybersecurity challenges.

Keywords

• authorship
• source code
• disassembly
• neural network
• machine learning