The detection of software vulnerabilities (or vulnerabilities for short) is an important problem that has yet to be tackled, as manifested by the many vulnerabilities reported on a daily basis. This calls for machine learning methods for vulnerability detection. Deep learning is attractive for this purpose because it alleviates the requirement to manually define features. Despite the tremendous success of deep learning in other application domains, its applicability to vulnerability detection is not systematically understood. In order to fill this void, we propose the first systematic framework for using deep learning to detect vulnerabilities in C/C++ programs with source code. The framework, dubbed Syntax-based, Semantics-based, and Vector Representations (SySeVR), focuses on obtaining program representations that can accommodate syntax and semantic information pertinent to vulnerabilities. Our experiments with four software products demonstrate the usefulness of the framework: we detect 15 vulnerabilities that are not reported in the National Vulnerability Database. Among these 15 vulnerabilities, seven are unknown and have been reported to the vendors, and the other eight have been “silently” patched by the vendors when releasing newer versions of the pertinent software products.

Automatically detecting software vulnerabilities is an important problem that has attracted much attention from the academic research community. However, existing vulnerability detectors still cannot achieve the vulnerability detection capability and the locating precision that would warrant their adoption for real-world use. In this article, we present a vulnerability detector that can simultaneously achieve a high detection capability and a high locating precision, dubbed Vul nerability Dee p learning-based Locator (VulDeeLocator). In the course of designing VulDeeLocator, we encounter difficulties including how to accommodate semantic relations between the definitions of types as well as macros and their uses across files, how to accommodate accurate control flows and variable define-use relations, and how to achieve high locating precision. We solve these difficulties by using two innovative ideas: (i) leveraging intermediate code to accommodate extra semantic information, and (ii) using the notion of granularity refinement to pin down locations of vulnerabilities. When applied to 200 files randomly selected from three real-world software products, VulDeeLocator detects 18 confirmed vulnerabilities (i.e., true-positives). Among them, 16 vulnerabilities correspond to known vulnerabilities; the other two are not reported in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) but have been “silently” patched by the vendor of Libav when releasing newer versions.

Detecting software vulnerabilities is an important problem and a recent development in tackling the problem is the use of deep learning models to detect software vulnerabilities. While effective, it is hard to explain why a deep learning model predicts a piece of code as vulnerable or not because of the black-box nature of deep learning models. Indeed, the interpretability of deep learning models is a daunting open problem. In this article, we make a significant step toward tackling the interpretability of deep learning model in vulnerability detection. Specifically, we introduce a high-fidelity explanation framework, which aims to identify a small number of tokens that make significant contributions to a detector’s prediction with respect to an example. Systematic experiments show that the framework indeed has a higher fidelity than existing methods, especially when features are not independent of each other (which often occurs in the real world). In particular, the framework can produce some vulnerability rules that can be understood by domain experts for accepting a detector’s outputs (i.e., true positives) or rejecting a detector’s outputs (i.e., false-positives and false-negatives). We also discuss limitations of the present study, which indicate interesting open problems for future research.

Software vulnerabilities are a major cyber threat and it is important to detect them. One important approach to detecting vulnerabilities is to use deep learning while treating a program function as a whole, known as function-level vulnerability detectors. However, the limitation of this approach is not understood. In this paper, we investigate its limitation in detecting one class of vulnerabilities known as inter-procedural vulnerabilities, where the to-be-patched statements and the vulnerability-triggering statements belong to different functions. For this purpose, we create the first Inter-Procedural Vulnerability Dataset (InterPVD) based on C/C++ open-source software, and we propose a tool dubbed VulTrigger for identifying vulnerability-triggering statements across functions. Experimental results show that VulTrigger can effectively identify vulnerability-triggering statements and inter-procedural vulnerabilities. Our findings include: (i) inter-procedural vulnerabilities are prevalent with an average of 2.8 inter-procedural layers; and (ii) function-level vulnerability detectors are much less effective in detecting to-be-patched functions of inter-procedural vulnerabilities than detecting their counterparts of intra-procedural vulnerabilities.

The Node Package Manager (NPM) registry contains millions of JavaScript packages widely shared between worldwide developers. However, NPM has also been abused by attackers to spread malicious packages, highlighting the importance of detecting malicious NPM packages. Existing malicious NPM package detectors suffer from, among other things, high false positives and/or high false negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel Malicious NPM Package Detector (MalPacDetector), which leverages Large Language Model (LLM) to automatically and dynamically generate features (rather than asking experts to manually define them). To evaluate the effectiveness of Mal-PacDetector and existing detectors, we construct a new NPM package dataset, which overcomes the weaknesses of existing datasets (e.g., a small number of examples and a high repetition rate of malicious fragments). The experimental results show that MalPacDetector outperforms existing detectors by achieving a false positive rate of 1. 3% and a false negative rate of 7. 5%. In particular, MalPacDetector detects 39 previously unknown malicious packages, which are confirmed by the NPM security team.