Stylometric Defenses Against Author Impersonation in Software Repositories

Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

In the rapidly evolving field of software development, code stylometry analyzing unique stylistic signatures of programmers plays a crit-ical role in authorship attribution and cybersecurity. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, have introduced new dimensions to this field, challenging traditional stylometry techniques. This study investigates the effectiveness of LLMs in altering code stylometry while preserving functionality and evaluates the impact of various prompt engineering strategies. Through comprehensive experiments, we assess how well these models can obscure stylistic signatures to avoid detection by a Random Forest classifier trained for authorship attribution. The results reveal significant differences in effectiveness between single-shot and multi-shot methods and highlight the importance of detailed, structured prompts. Additionally, functionality preservation checks demonstrate the challenges in maintaining code integrity post-modification. This research provides critical insights into the robustness of authorship attribution techniques against advanced AI capabilities, informing future cybersecurity and software engineering developments

Computational stylometry studies writing style through quantitative textual patterns, enabling applications such as authorship attribution, identity linking, and plagiarism detection. Despite the relevance of language modeling to these tasks, the pre-training of modern large language models (LLMs) has been underutilized in authorship attribution and verification. We introduce an unsupervised framework that uses the log-probabilities of an LLM to measure style transferability between two texts. This framework takes advantage of the extensive Causal Language Modeling (CLM) pre-training, one-shot capabilities and scale of LLMs, avoiding explicit supervision. Our methods substantially outperform prompting-based unsupervised baselines in authorship verification at similar model sizes, and is competitive with or improves contrastive baselines in most settings with sufficient model scale. We further observe strong performance across non-English languages. The effectiveness of the proposed framework improves consistently with increasing model scale. In the case of authorship verification, we propose an additional mechanism that increases test-time computation to improve accuracy; enabling flexible trade-offs between computational cost and task performance.