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Detecting software vulnerabilities has been a challenge for decades. Many techniques have been developed to detect vulnerabilities by reporting whether a vulnerability exists in the code of software. But few of them have the capability to categorize the types of detected vulnerabilities, which is crucial for human developers or other tools to analyze and address vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present our work on identifying the types of vulnerabilities using deep learning. Our data consists of code slices parsed in a manner that captures the syntax and semantics of a vulnerability, sourced from prior work. We train deep neural networks on these features to perform multiclass classification of software vulnerabilities in the dataset. Our experiments show that our models can effectively identify the vulnerability classes of the vulnerable functions in our dataset.
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VELVET: a noVel Ensemble Learning approach to automatically locate VulnErable sTatements
Automatically locating vulnerable statements in source code is crucial to assure software security and alleviate developers' debugging efforts. This becomes even more important in today's software ecosystem, where vulnerable code can flow easily and unwittingly within and across software repositories like GitHub. Across such millions of lines of code, traditional static and dynamic approaches struggle to scale. Although existing machine-learning-based approaches look promising in such a setting, most work detects vulnerable code at a higher granularity – at the method or file level. Thus, developers still need to inspect a significant amount of code to locate the vulnerable statement(s) that need to be fixed. This paper presents Velvet, a novel ensemble learning approach to locate vulnerable statements. Our model combines graph-based and sequence-based neural networks to successfully capture the local and global context of a program graph and effectively understand code semantics and vulnerable patterns. To study Velvet's effectiveness, we use an off-the-shelf synthetic dataset and a recently published real-world dataset. In the static analysis setting, where vulnerable functions are not detected in advance, Velvet achieves 4.5× better performance than the baseline static analyzers on the real-world data. For the isolated vulnerability localization task, where we assume the vulnerability of a function is known while the specific vulnerable statement is unknown, we compare Velvet with several neural networks that also attend to local and global context of code. Velvet achieves 99.6% and 43.6% top-1 accuracy over synthetic data and real-world data, respectively, outperforming the baseline deep learning models by 5.3-29.0%.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1815494
- PAR ID:
- 10346729
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 959 to 970
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00114
