From Whence It Came: Detecting Source Code Clones by Analyzing Assembler

To date, most clone detection techniques have concentrated on various forms of source code analysis, often by analyzing token streams. In this paper, we introduce a complementary technique of analyzing generated assembler for clones. This approach is appealing as it is mostly impervious to trivial changes in the source, with compilation serving as a kind of normalization technique. We have built detectors to analyze both Java VM code as well as GCC Linux assembler for C and C++. In the paper, we describe our approach and show how it can serve as a valuable complementary semantic approach to syntactic source code based detection.