MOSS, or Measure of Software Similarity, is a tool used to detect plagiarism in source code programs. It’s become increasingly important for digital media platforms and e-commerce website developers to check their work for similarities to ensure originality.

So, how does one use MOSS? It’s simple! MOSS is a command-line script that sends files to a server for analysis. The copy-detection algorithm compares source code solutions to identify any instances of similar code. For MOSS to be effective, there are three important properties to keep in mind:

  1. White Space Insensitivity: MOSS should ignore meaningless syntax, such as whitespace, in order to accurately detect plagiarism. This also includes ignoring the renaming of variables.

  2. Suppression of Noise: The algorithm should detect long, meaningful matches, not just single words.

  3. Position Independence: The placement of matching segments in each document should not affect the number of matches found by the algorithm.

Start uncovering plagiarism in your source code today with MOSS.