arXiv AI

Disappearing Ink: Obfuscation Breaks N-gram Code Watermarks in Theory and Practice

The paper demonstrates that N‑gram based code watermarking schemes, widely used to identify machine‑generated code, are ineffective when faced with realistic code obfuscation. By modeling semantics‑preserving transformations as a Markov random walk and introducing the assumption of distribution consistency, the authors prove that obfuscation can drive the failure rate of any detector to nearly 1 minus its false‑positive rate. Extensive experiments across multiple watermarking methods, LLMs, languages, benchmarks, and obfuscators confirm that detectors collapse to near‑random performance (AUROC ≈ 0.5) after obfuscation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

Multi-Channel Spread-Spectrum Code Watermarking

arXiv:2607. 06009v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attributing code to the large language model that produced it is essential for provenance, licensing, and misuse accountability, yet no deployed watermark meets this need.

By Soohyeon Choi, Debin Gao, Yue Duan
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Efficient and Scalable Provenance Tracking for LLM-Generated Code Snippets

arXiv:2605. 28510v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) for code completion and generation are increasingly used in software development, yet they may reproduce training examples verbatim and without authorship attribution, raising legal and ethical concerns around plagiarism and license compliance.

By Andrea Gurioli, Davide D'Ascenzo, Federico Pennino, Maurizio Gabbrielli, Stefano Zacchiroli