MacDonell et al. (2002) outline a framework for software forensics that extends traditional authorship analysis to source‑code artifacts, describing syntactic, structural, and semantic metrics and illustrating their evidential value through a fictionalized litigation scenario. The paper addresses authorship attribution and stylometric profiling of program code, and discusses the admissibility and interpretive challenges of such evidence in civil and criminal courts.
Bears on: authorship & stylometry · concepts & methods · the ciphers