Cheating Cheating Detectors

In this paper we present a new cheating technique that is successful at defeating cheating detectors and could become popular with students. The idea is to use obfuscating code transformations (such as those found in the SANDMARK tool) to apply a sequence of minor code transformations to a copied programming assignment. This purpose is to produce a copy that will defeat detection. We show that this technique is successful in defeating common plagiarism detectors such as Moss. This paper is offered as a cautionary tale to the Computer Science teaching community. With the advent of powerful code transformation tools it will become necessary to develop correspondingly more powerful cheating detectors, or to revert back to manually testing for plagiarism.