Plag Patrol

An app for detecting documents tampered to bypass plagiarism detectors

Introduction

Plag Patrol is an app for finding suspicious alterations in PDF documents made to bypass certain plagiarism detection tools, such as Turnitin and Compilatio, based on a paper firstly published in the November 2018 number of Sego-Bit.

Basically, what this app does is highlight all sections of a page not visible to the naked eye which will modify the plain text recognized by such tools, thus altering the final plagiarism score of the document.

Installation

Please visit the releases section in this repository to download the latest binary for your Operating System.

If you prefer to build the app yourself, you'll need NodeJS with NPM/Yarn:

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/josemmo/plagpatrol
cd plagpatrol

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build the app
npm run build

Headless operation

Plag Patrol can run from a terminal without the need for user interaction.

To analyze a document without prompting any window, use the following command:

plagpatrol path/to/file.pdf --headless

This will return, when finished, a JSON string containing the result of the analysis. For example:

{
  "success": true,
  "totalPages": 3,
  "totalIssues": 363,
  "pages": [
    {
      "number": 1,
      "issues": 146
    },
    {
      "number": 2,
      "issues": 136
    },
    {
      "number": 3,
      "issues": 81
    }
  ]
}

WARNING: this functionality is experimental and may not work as expected.

Demo files

Inside demo/ there are multiple sample PDF documents to test against Plag Patrol.

License

Plag Patrol is provided under the MIT license and is powered by these awesome technologies:

• Electron
• jQuery
• PDF.js
• Webpack