During the serialization process, one of the things that gets written is the class descriptor. This class descriptor contains the name and the serialVersionUID of the class.
The method can be found in the class java.io.ObjectStreamClass(http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/io/ObjectStreamClass.html)
/**
* Writes non-proxy class descriptor information to given output stream.
*/
void writeNonProxy(ObjectOutputStream out) throws IOException {
out.writeUTF(name);
out.writeLong(getSerialVersionUID());
byte flags = 0;
if (externalizable) {
flags |= ObjectStreamConstants.SC_EXTERNALIZABLE;
int protocol = out.getProtocolVersion();
if (protocol != ObjectStreamConstants.PROTOCOL_VERSION_1) {
flags |= ObjectStreamConstants.SC_BLOCK_DATA;
}
} else if (serializable) {
flags |= ObjectStreamConstants.SC_SERIALIZABLE;
}
if (hasWriteObjectData) {
flags |= ObjectStreamConstants.SC_WRITE_METHOD;
}
if (isEnum) {
flags |= ObjectStreamConstants.SC_ENUM;
}
out.writeByte(flags);
out.writeShort(fields.length);
for (int i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) {
ObjectStreamField f = fields[i];
out.writeByte(f.getTypeCode());
out.writeUTF(f.getName());
if (!f.isPrimitive()) {
out.writeTypeString(f.getTypeString());
}
}
}