English

DuCodeMark: Dual-Purpose Code Dataset Watermarking via Style-Aware Watermark-Poison Design

Cryptography and Security 2026-04-21 v2

Abstract

The proliferation of large language models for code (CodeLMs) and open-source contributions has heightened concerns over unauthorized use of source code datasets. While watermarking provides a viable protection mechanism by embedding ownership signals, existing methods rely on detectable trigger-target patterns and are limited to source-code tasks, overlooking other scenarios such as decompilation tasks. In this paper, we propose DuCodeMark, a stealthy and robust dual-purpose watermarking method for code datasets that generalizes across both source-code tasks and decompilation tasks. DuCodeMark parses each code sample into an abstract syntax tree (AST), applies language-specific style transformations to construct stealthy trigger-target pairs, and injects repressible poisoned features into a subset of return-typed samples to enhance robustness against watermark removal or evasion. These features remain inactive during normal training but are activated upon watermark removal, degrading model performance. For verification, DuCodeMark employs a black-box method based on the independent-samples tt-test. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of DuCodeMark across 72 settings spanning two code tasks, two programming languages, three CodeLMs, and six decoding temperatures. The results demonstrate that it consistently achieves strong verifiability (p<0.05p < 0.05), high stealthiness (suspicion rate \leq 0.36), robustness against both watermark and poisoning attacks (recall \leq 0.57), and a substantial drop in model performance upon watermark removal (Pass@1 drops by 28.6%), underscoring its practicality and resilience.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.10611,
  title  = {DuCodeMark: Dual-Purpose Code Dataset Watermarking via Style-Aware Watermark-Poison Design},
  author = {Yuchen Chen and Yuan Xiao and Chunrong Fang and Zhenyu Chen and Baowen Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10611},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to the 34rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2026)