DeCoMa: Detecting and Purifying Code Dataset Watermarks through Dual Channel Code Abstraction

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Main Authors: Xiao, Yuan, Chen, Yuchen, Ma, Shiqing, Huang, Haocheng, Fang, Chunrong, Chen, Yanwei, Sun, Weisong, Zhu, Yunfeng, Zhang, Xiaofang, Chen, Zhenyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xiao, Yuan
Chen, Yuchen
Ma, Shiqing
Huang, Haocheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Yanwei
Sun, Weisong
Zhu, Yunfeng
Zhang, Xiaofang
Chen, Zhenyu
author_facet Xiao, Yuan
Chen, Yuchen
Ma, Shiqing
Huang, Haocheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Yanwei
Sun, Weisong
Zhu, Yunfeng
Zhang, Xiaofang
Chen, Zhenyu
contents Watermarking is a technique to help identify the source of data points, which can be used to help prevent the misuse of protected datasets. Existing methods on code watermarking, leveraging the idea from the backdoor research, embed stealthy triggers as watermarks. Despite their high resilience against dilution attacks and backdoor detections, the robustness has not been fully evaluated. To fill this gap, we propose DeCoMa, a dual-channel approach to Detect and purify Code dataset waterMarks. To overcome the high barrier created by the stealthy and hidden nature of code watermarks, DeCoMa leverages dual-channel constraints on code to generalize and map code samples into standardized templates. Subsequently, DeCoMa extracts hidden watermarks by identifying outlier associations between paired elements within the standardized templates. Finally, DeCoMa purifies the watermarked dataset by removing all samples containing the detected watermark, enabling the silent appropriation of protected code. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of DeCoMa, covering 14 types of code watermarks and 3 representative intelligent code tasks (a total of 14 scenarios). Experimental results demonstrate that DeCoMa achieves a stable recall of 100% in 14 code watermark detection scenarios, significantly outperforming the baselines. Additionally, DeCoMa effectively attacks code watermarks with embedding rates as low as 0.1%, while maintaining comparable model performance after training on the purified dataset. Furthermore, as DeCoMa requires no model training for detection, it achieves substantially higher efficiency than all baselines, with a speedup ranging from 31.5 to 130.9X. The results call for more advanced watermarking techniques for code models, while DeCoMa can serve as a baseline for future evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyuanpigo/DeCoMa
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07002
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeCoMa: Detecting and Purifying Code Dataset Watermarks through Dual Channel Code Abstraction
Xiao, Yuan
Chen, Yuchen
Ma, Shiqing
Huang, Haocheng
Fang, Chunrong
Chen, Yanwei
Sun, Weisong
Zhu, Yunfeng
Zhang, Xiaofang
Chen, Zhenyu
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
Watermarking is a technique to help identify the source of data points, which can be used to help prevent the misuse of protected datasets. Existing methods on code watermarking, leveraging the idea from the backdoor research, embed stealthy triggers as watermarks. Despite their high resilience against dilution attacks and backdoor detections, the robustness has not been fully evaluated. To fill this gap, we propose DeCoMa, a dual-channel approach to Detect and purify Code dataset waterMarks. To overcome the high barrier created by the stealthy and hidden nature of code watermarks, DeCoMa leverages dual-channel constraints on code to generalize and map code samples into standardized templates. Subsequently, DeCoMa extracts hidden watermarks by identifying outlier associations between paired elements within the standardized templates. Finally, DeCoMa purifies the watermarked dataset by removing all samples containing the detected watermark, enabling the silent appropriation of protected code. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of DeCoMa, covering 14 types of code watermarks and 3 representative intelligent code tasks (a total of 14 scenarios). Experimental results demonstrate that DeCoMa achieves a stable recall of 100% in 14 code watermark detection scenarios, significantly outperforming the baselines. Additionally, DeCoMa effectively attacks code watermarks with embedding rates as low as 0.1%, while maintaining comparable model performance after training on the purified dataset. Furthermore, as DeCoMa requires no model training for detection, it achieves substantially higher efficiency than all baselines, with a speedup ranging from 31.5 to 130.9X. The results call for more advanced watermarking techniques for code models, while DeCoMa can serve as a baseline for future evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyuanpigo/DeCoMa
title DeCoMa: Detecting and Purifying Code Dataset Watermarks through Dual Channel Code Abstraction
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07002