Stylometric Defenses Against Author Impersonation in Software Repositories
Software supply-chain attacks increasingly exploit an identity gap where compromised maintainer accounts authorize malicious changes. This work evaluates patch-level authorship verification as a behavioral defense layer, showing that stylometric analysis can operate not only on full source files but also on patch-level commits. We fine-tune a cross-modal transformer on more than 20 years of Linux kernel commit history to embed code diffs and commit messages into a unified stylometric space, achieving ROC AUC of 0.93 for open-world authorship verification. We then use these representations in a streaming anomaly detector suited to continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) settings. We ...
| Authors | Leonid Ravich, Michael Fire |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 August 2026 |
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