Stylometric Defenses Against Author Impersonation in Software Repositories

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Aug 2026] Stylometric Defenses Against Author Impersonation in Software Repositories Leonid Ravich, Michael Fire 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 validate the pipeline on two retrospective supply-chain incidents involving different patch characteristics: the 2021 PHP backdoor and the 2026 ForceMemo/GlassWorm campaign. Without retraining, the proposed detector surfaces both PHP forged commits within approximately 1% of the maintainer audit queue and ranks the 28 scoreable ForceMemo spoofs with a median per-repository review burden of 0.8%. These results indicate that cross-modal patch-level embeddings can support behavioral triage against author impersonation in real-world repositories. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2608.02695 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.02695v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02695 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Leonid Ravich [view email] [v1] Mon, 3 Aug 2026 11:02:13 UTC (10,358 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)