How MOSS Works

1 · Danny Yang · May 3, 2019, midnight
MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) is a very effective plagiarism detection system that is commonly used by computer science professors across the country. Most students know that it’s nearly impossible to get away with plagiarism when MOSS is used, but not many know of how MOSS works or why it’s so effective. In this post, I will give an overview of copy-detection, document fingerprinting, and explain the winnowing algorithm used by MOSS. Then I will discuss the implementation and use of MOS...