De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries

As a programmer you have a unique style, and stylometry techniques can be used to fingerprint your style and determine with high probability whether or not a piece of code was written by you. That makes a degree of intuitive sense when considering source code. But suppose we don’t have source code?

Suppose all we have is an executable binary? Caliskan et al., show us that it’s possible to de-anonymise programmers even under these conditions. Amazingly, their technique still works even when debugging symbols are removed, aggressive compiler optimisations are enabled, and traditional binary obfuscation techniques are applied!

Anonymous authorship of binaries is consequently hard to achieve.

Source: acolyer.org