Over the past few decades, researchers have put their effort and paid significant attention to the authorship attribution field, as it plays an important role in software forensics analysis, plagiarism detection, security attack detection, and protection of trade secrets, patent claims, copyright infringement, or cases of software theft. It helps new researchers understand the state-of-the-art works on authorship attribution methods, identify and examine the emerging methods for authorship attribution, and discuss their key concepts, associated challenges, and potential future work that could help newcomers in this field. This paper comprehensively surveys authorship attribution methods and their key classifications, used feature types, available datasets, model evaluation criteria and metrics, and challenges and limitations. In addition, we discuss the potential future research directions of the authorship attribution field based on the insights and lessons learned from this survey work.

Source Code Authorship Attribution (SCAA) is the technique to find the real author of source code in a corpus. Though it is a privacy threat to open-source programmers, it has shown to be significantly helpful in developing forensic-based applications such as ghostwriting detection, copyright dispute settlements, catching authors of malicious applications using source code, and other code analysis applications. Recent advances in SCAA techniques have performed exceptionally well on varied datasets. However, recent works on gradient-based attacks and universal perturbations can adversarially modify source code to reduce the accuracy of state-of-the-art classification techniques based on deep neural networks to as low as 10%. In this paper, we derive inspiration from recent advances in cyber-security and propose using the concept of defensive distillation to create a new architecture for source code authorship attribution with increased robustness against such adversarial attacks (reduce sent size). We empirically show that our approach, defensive distillation, and varied feature selection reduce miss-classification on perturbed source code files for Google code Jam and GitHub database while maintaining a 95% accuracy on legitimate source code files.