Just-in-time software vulnerability detection : are we there yet?
Lomio, Francesco; Iannone, Emanuele; De Lucia, Andrea; Palomba, Fabio; Lenarduzzi, Valentina (2022-02-25)
Lomio, F., Iannone, E., De Lucia, A., Palomba, F., & Lenarduzzi, V. (2022). Just-in-time software vulnerability detection: Are we there yet? Journal of Systems and Software, 188, 111283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2022.111283
© 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022051134386
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
Background: Software vulnerabilities are weaknesses in source code that might be exploited to cause harm or loss. Previous work has proposed a number of automated machine learning approaches to detect them. Most of these techniques work at release-level, meaning that they aim at predicting the files that will potentially be vulnerable in a future release. Yet, researchers have shown that a commit-level identification of source code issues might better fit the developer’s needs, speeding up their resolution.
Objective: To investigate how currently available machine learning-based vulnerability detection mechanisms can support developers in the detection of vulnerabilities at commit-level.
Method: We perform an empirical study where we consider nine projects accounting for 8991 commits and experiment with eight machine learners built using process, product, and textual metrics.
Results: We point out three main findings: (1) basic machine learners rarely perform well; (2) the use of ensemble machine learning algorithms based on boosting can substantially improve the performance; and (3) the combination of more metrics does not necessarily improve the classification capabilities.
Conclusions: Further research should focus on just-in-time vulnerability detection, especially with respect to the introduction of smart approaches for feature selection and training strategies.
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