De-Anonymizing Programmers via Code Stylometry (2015) [pdf]
I'm a coauthor of this paper. It was published a couple of years ago; pleasantly surprised to see it here.The paper shows that programmers have distinctive styles in their source code that can be extracted to create a fingerprint of coding style. It's not just the obvious stuff like spaces vs. tabs -- parsing the code and looking at the Abstract Syntax Tree is what results in a powerful fingerprint.We have a follow-up to this paper showing that surprisingly, coding style survives in compiled binaries (even with optimization turned on and debugging symbols removed): https://www.princeton.edu/~aylinc/papers/caliskan-islam_when...