Predicting vulnerable source code helps to focus attention on those parts of the code that need to be examined with more scrutiny. Recent work proposed the use of function names as semantic cues that can be learned by a deep neural network (DNN) to aid in the hunt for vulnerability of functions.
Combining identifier splitting, which splits each function name into its constituent words, with a novel frequency-based algorithm, we explore the extent to which the words that make up a function's name can predict potentially vulnerable functions. In contrast to *lightweight* predictions by a DNN that considers only function names, avoiding the use of a DNN provides *featherweight* predictions. The underlying idea is that function names that contain certain "dangerous" words are more likely to accompany vulnerable functions. Of course, this assumes that the frequency-based algorithm can be properly tuned to focus on truly dangerous words.
Because it is more transparent than a DNN, the frequency-based algorithm enables us to investigate the inner workings of the DNN. If successful, this investigation into what the DNN does and does not learn will help us train more effective future models.
We empirically evaluate our approach on a heterogeneous dataset containing over 73000 functions labeled vulnerable, and over 950000 functions labeled benign. Our analysis shows that words alone account for a significant portion of the DNN's classification ability. We also find that words are of greatest value in the datasets with a more homogeneous vocabulary. Thus, when working within the scope of a given project, where the vocabulary is unavoidably homogeneous, our approach provides a cheaper, potentially complementary, technique to aid in the hunt for source-code vulnerabilities. Finally, this approach has the advantage that it is viable with orders of magnitude less training data.
CVE-LLM : Ontology-Assisted Automatic Vulnerability Evaluation Using Large Language Models
Digital Technology and Innovation, Siemens Healthineers USA（美国西门子医疗数字技术与创新部门）；Cybersecurity, Siemens Healthineers Germany（德国西门子医疗网络安全部门）；Corporate Technology, Siemens AG Romania（罗马尼亚西门子公司企业技术部门）
As the size and complexity of software systems increase, the number and sophistication of software security flaws increase as well. The analysis of these flaws began as a manual approach, but it soon became apparent that tools were necessary to assist human experts in this task, resulting in a number of techniques and approaches that automated aspects of the vulnerability analysis process. Recently, DARPA carried out the Cyber Grand Challenge, a competition among autonomous vulnerability analysis systems designed to push the tool-assisted human-centered paradigm into the territory of complete …
LLM-HyPZ: Hardware Vulnerability Discovery using an LLM-Assisted Hybrid Platform for Zero-Shot Knowledge Extraction and Refinement
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（电气与计算机工程系，亚利桑那大学）；Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（系统与工业工程系，亚利桑那大学）；College of Information Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA（信息科学学院，亚利桑那大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA（电气工程与计算机科学学院，北达科他大学）；Department of Computer Science, University of California Davis, CA, USA（计算机科学系，加州大学戴维斯分校）
Ball State University（鲍尔州立大学）；Illinois State University（伊利诺伊州立大学）
Detecting security vulnerabilities in software before they are exploited has been a challenging problem for decades. Traditional code analysis methods have been proposed, but are often ineffective and inefficient. In this work, we model software vulnerability detection as a natural language processing (NLP) problem with source code treated as texts, and address the automated software venerability detection with recent advanced deep learning NLP models assisted by transfer learning on written English. For training and testing, we have preprocessed the NIST NVD/SARD databases and built a dataset…
