Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

6-2024

Abstract

Source code vulnerability detection aims to identify inherent vulnerabilities to safeguard software systems from potential attacks. Many prior studies overlook diverse vulnerability characteristics, simplifying the problem into a binary (0-1) classification task for example determining whether it is vulnerable or not. This poses a challenge for a single deep-learning based model to effectively learn the wide array of vulnerability characteristics. Furthermore, due to the challenges associated with collecting large-scale vulnerability data, these detectors often overfit limited training datasets, resulting in lower model generalization performance. To address the aforementioned challenges, in this work, we introduce a fine-grained vulnerability detector namely FGVulDet. Unlike previous approaches, FGVulDet employs multiple classifiers to discern characteristics of various vulnerability types and combines their outputs to identify the specific type of vulnerability. Each classifier is designed to learn type-specific vulnerability semantics. Additionally, to address the scarcity of data for some vulnerability types and enhance data diversity for learning better vulnerability semantics, we propose a novel vulnerability-preserving data augmentation technique to augment the number of vulnerabilities. Taking inspiration from recent advancements in graph neural networks for learning program semantics, we incorporate a Gated Graph Neural Network (GGNN) and extend it to an edge-aware GGNN to capture edge-type information. FGVulDet is trained on a large-scale dataset from GitHub, encompassing five different types of vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments compared with static-analysis-based approaches and learning-based approaches have demonstrated the effectiveness of FGVulDet.

Keywords

Graph Neural Networks, Vulnerability Detection

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

LCTES 2024: Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES ’24), June 24, Copenhagen

First Page

166

Last Page

177

ISBN

9798400706165

Identifier

10.1145/3652032.3657564

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3652032.3657564

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