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1. Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Detection in Source Code: Performance Comparison between Traditional and Quantum Machine Learning Algorithms

   Akter, M. ; Faruk, M. ; Anjum, N. ; Masum, M. ; Shahriar, H. ; Sakib, N. ; Rahman, A. ; Wu, F. ; Cuzzocrea, A. ( December 2022 , IEEE International Conference on Big Data)

   The software supply chain (SSC) attack has become one of the crucial issues that are being increased rapidly with the advancement of the software development domain. In general, SSC attacks execute during the software development processes lead to vulnerabilities in software products targeting downstream customers and even involved stakeholders. Machine Learning approaches are proven in detecting and preventing software security vulnerabilities. Besides, emerging quantum machine learning can be promising in addressing SSC attacks. Considering the distinction between traditional and quantum machine learning, performance could be varies based on the proportions of the experimenting dataset. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis between quantum neural networks (QNN) and conventional neural networks (NN) with a software supply chain attack dataset known as ClaMP. Our goal is to distinguish the performance between QNN and NN and to conduct the experiment, we develop two different models for QNN and NN by utilizing Pennylane for quantum and TensorFlow and Keras for traditional respectively. We evaluated the performance of both models with different proportions of the ClaMP dataset to identify the f1 score, recall, precision, and accuracy. We also measure the execution time to check the efficiency of both models. The demonstration result indicates that execution time for QNN is slower than NN with a higher percentage of datasets. Due to recent advancements in QNN, a large level of experiments shall be carried out to understand both models accurately in our future research. 

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2. Exploring the Vulnerabilities of Machine Learning and Quantum Machine Learning to Adversarial Attacks using a Malware Dataset: A Comparative Analysis

   Akter, M. ; Shahriar, H. ; Iqbal, A. ; Hossain, Md. ; Karim, M. ; Clincy, V. ; Voicu, R. ( January 2023 , IEEE CARL K. CHANG SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE SERVICES ENGINEERING)

   The burgeoning fields of machine learning (ML) and quantum machine learning (QML) have shown remarkable potential in tackling complex problems across various domains. However, their susceptibility to adversarial attacks raises concerns when deploying these systems in security-sensitive applications. In this study, we present a comparative analysis of the vulnerability of ML and QML models, specifically conventional neural networks (NN) and quantum neural networks (QNN), to adversarial attacks using a malware dataset. We utilize a software supply chain attack dataset known as ClaMP and develop two distinct models for QNN and NN, employing Pennylane for quantum implementations and TensorFlow and Keras for traditional implementations. Our methodology involves crafting adversarial samples by introducing random noise to a small portion of the dataset and evaluating the impact on the models’ performance using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score metrics. Based on our observations, both ML and QML models exhibit vulnerability to adversarial attacks. While the QNN’s accuracy decreases more significantly compared to the NN after the attack, it demonstrates better performance in terms of precision and recall, indicating higher resilience in detecting true positives under adversarial conditions. We also find that adversarial samples crafted for one model type can impair the performance of the other, highlighting the need for robust defense mechanisms. Our study serves as a foundation for future research focused on enhancing the security and resilience of ML and QML models, particularly QNN, given its recent advancements. A more extensive range of experiments will be conducted to better understand the performance and robustness of both models in the face of adversarial attacks. 

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3. Quantum Machine Learning for Software Supply Chain Attacks: How Far Can We Go?

   https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC54236.2022.00097  

   Mohammad Masum, Mohammad Nazim ( June 2022 , IEEE Conference on Computers, Software & Applications)

   Quantum Computing (QC) has gained immense popularity as a potential solution to deal with the ever-increasing size of data and associated challenges leveraging the concept of quantum random access memory (QRAM). QC promises quadratic or exponential increases in computational time with quantum parallelism and thus offer a huge leap forward in the computation of Machine Learning algorithms. This paper analyzes speed up performance of QC when applied to machine learning algorithms, known as Quantum Machine Learning (QML). We applied QML methods such as Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), and Quantum Neural Network (QNN) to detect Software Supply Chain (SSC) attacks. Due to the access limitations of real quantum computers, the QML methods were implemented on open-source quantum simulators such as IBM Qiskit and TensorFlow Quantum. We evaluated the performance of QML in terms of processing speed and accuracy and finally, compared with its classical counterparts. Interestingly, the experimental results differ to the speed up promises of QC by demonstrating higher computational time and lower accuracy in comparison to the classical approaches for SSC attacks. 

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4. Automated Vulnerability Detection in Source Code Using Quantum Natural Language Processing

   Akter, M. ; Shahriar, H. ; Bhuiya, Z. ( December 2022 , The Second International Conference on Ubiquitous Security (UbiSec 2022))

   One of the most important challenges in the field of software code audit is the presence of vulnerabilities in software source code. Every year, more and more software flaws are found, either internally in proprietary code or revealed publicly. These flaws are highly likely exploited and lead to system compromise, data leakage, or denial of service. C and C++ open-source codes are now available in order to create a large-scale, classical machine-learning and quantum machine-learning system for function-level vulnerability identification. We assembled a sizable dataset of millions of open-source functions that point to potential exploits. We created an efficient and scalable vulnerability detection method based on a deep neural network model– Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and quantum machine learning model– Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM), that can learn features extracted from the source codes. The source code is first converted into a minimal intermediate representation to remove the pointless components and shorten the dependency. Previous studies lack analyzing features of the source code that causes models to recognize flaws in real-life examples. Therefore, We keep the semantic and syntactic information using state-of-the-art word embedding algorithms such as Glove and fastText. The embedded vectors are subsequently fed into the classical and quantum convolutional neural networks to classify the possible vulnerabilities. To measure the performance, we used evaluation metrics such as F1 score, precision, recall, accuracy, and total execution time. We made a comparison between the results derived from the classical LSTM and quantum LSTM using basic feature representation as well as semantic and syntactic representation. We found that the QLSTM with semantic and syntactic features detects significantly accurate vulnerability and runs faster than its classical counterpart. 

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5. Investigating Novel Approaches to Defend Software Supply Chain Attacks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSREW55968.2022.00081  

   Hossain Faruk, Md Jobair ; Tasnim, Masrura ; Shahriar, Hossain ; Valero, Maria ; Rahman, Akond ; Wu, Fan ( October 2022 , 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW))

   Software supply chain attacks occur during the processes of producing software is compromised, resulting in vulnerabilities that target downstream customers. While the number of successful exploits is limited, the impact of these attacks is significant. Despite increased awareness and research into software supply chain attacks, there is limited information available on mitigating or architecting for these risks, and existing information is focused on singular and independent elements of the supply chain. In this paper, we extensively review software supply chain security using software development tools and infrastructure. We investigate the path that attackers find is least resistant followed by adapting and finding the next best way to complete an attack. We also provide a thorough discussion on how common software supply chain attacks can be prevented, preventing malicious hackers from gaining access to an organization's development tools and infrastructure including the development environment. We considered various SSC attacks on stolen code-sign certificates by malicious attackers and prevented unnoticed malware from passing by security scanners. We are aiming to extend our research to contribute to preventing software supply chain attacks by proposing novel techniques and frameworks. 

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