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Register a new userAn Empirical Cybersecurity Evaluation of GitHub Copilots Code Contributions
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Hammond Pearce
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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There is burgeoning interest in designing AI-based systems to assist humans in designing computing systems, including tools that automatically generate computer code. The most notable of these comes in the form of the first self-described `AI pair programmer, GitHub Copilot, a language model trained over open-source GitHub code. However, code often contains bugs - and so, given the vast quantity of unvetted code that Copilot has processed, it is certain that the language model will have learned from exploitable, buggy code. This raises concerns on the security of Copilots code contributions. In this work, we systematically investigate the prevalence and conditions that can cause GitHub Copilot to recommend insecure code. To perform this analysis we prompt Copilot to generate code in scenarios relevant to high-risk CWEs (e.g. those from MITREs Top 25 list). We explore Copilots performance on three distinct code generation axes -- examining how it performs given diversity of weaknesses, diversity of prompts, and diversity of domains. In total, we produce 89 different scenarios for Copilot to complete, producing 1,692 programs. Of these, we found approximately 40% to be vulnerable.
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Machine learning techniques are currently used extensively for automating various cybersecurity tasks. Most of these techniques utilize supervised learning algorithms that rely on training the algorithm to classify incoming data into different categories, using data encountered in the relevant domain. A critical vulnerability of these algorithms is that they are susceptible to adversarial attacks where a malicious entity called an adversary deliberately alters the training data to misguide the learning algorithm into making classification errors. Adversarial attacks could render the learning algorithm unsuitable to use and leave critical systems vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Our paper provides a detailed survey of the state-of-the-art techniques that are used to make a machine learning algorithm robust against adversarial attacks using the computational framework of game theory. We also discuss open problems and challenges and possible directions for further research that would make deep machine learning-based systems more robust and reliable for cybersecurity tasks.
This paper proposes a new event-based parameter switching method for the control tasks of cybersecurity in the context of preventive and reactive cyber defense dynamics. Our parameter switching method helps avoid excessive control costs as well as guarantees the dynamics to converge as our desired speed. Meanwhile, it can be proved that this approach is Zeno-free. A new estimation method with adaptive time windows is used to bridge the gap between the probability state and the sampling state. With the new estimation method, several practical experiments are given afterwards.
For most deep learning practitioners, sequence modeling is synonymous with recurrent networks. Yet recent results indicate that convolutional architectures can outperform recurrent networks on tasks such as audio synthesis and machine translation. Given a new sequence modeling task or dataset, which architecture should one use? We conduct a systematic evaluation of generic convolutional and recurrent architectures for sequence modeling. The models are evaluated across a broad range of standard tasks that are commonly used to benchmark recurrent networks. Our results indicate that a simple convolutional architecture outperforms canonical recurrent networks such as LSTMs across a diverse range of tasks and datasets, while demonstrating longer effective memory. We conclude that the common association between sequence modeling and recurrent networks should be reconsidered, and convolutional networks should be regarded as a natural starting point for sequence modeling tasks. To assist related work, we have made code available at http://github.com/locuslab/TCN .
Recently, a number of approaches and techniques have been introduced for reporting software statistics with strong privacy guarantees. These range from abstract algorithms to comprehensive systems with varying assumptions and built upon local differential privacy mechanisms and anonymity. Based on the Encode-Shuffle-Analyze (ESA) framework, notable results formally clarified large improvements in privacy guarantees without loss of utility by making reports anonymous. However, these results either comprise of systems with seemingly disparate mechanisms and attack models, or formal statements with little guidance to practitioners. Addressing this, we provide a formal treatment and offer prescriptive guidelines for privacy-preserving reporting with anonymity. We revisit the ESA framework with a simple, abstract model of attackers as well as assumptions covering it and other proposed systems of anonymity. In light of new formal privacy bounds, we examine the limitations of sketch-based encodings and ESA mechanisms such as data-dependent crowds. We also demonstrate how the ESA notion of fragmentation (reporting data aspects in separate, unlinkable messages) improves privacy/utility tradeoffs both in terms of local and central differential-privacy guarantees. Finally, to help practitioners understand the applicability and limitations of privacy-preserving reporting, we report on a large number of empirical experiments. We use real-world datasets with heavy-tailed or near-flat distributions, which pose the greatest difficulty for our techniques; in particular, we focus on data drawn from images that can be easily visualized in a way that highlights reconstruction errors. Showing the promise of the approach, and of independent interest, we also report on experiments using anonymous, privacy-preserving reporting to train high-accuracy deep neural networks on standard tasks---MNIST and CIFAR-10.
Cyber-security is an important societal concern. Cyber-attacks have increased in numbers as well as in the extent of damage caused in every attack. Large organizations operate a Cyber Security Operation Center (CSOC), which form the first line of cyber-defense. The inspection of cyber-alerts is a critical part of CSOC operations. A recent work, in collaboration with Army Research Lab, USA proposed a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to prevent the cyber-alert queue length from growing large and overwhelming the defender. Given the potential deployment of this approach to CSOCs run by US defense agencies, we perform a red team (adversarial) evaluation of this approach. Further, with the recent attacks on learning systems, it is even more important to test the limits of this RL approach. Towards that end, we learn an adversarial alert generation policy that is a best response to the defender inspection policy. Surprisingly, we find the defender policy to be quite robust to the best response of the attacker. In order to explain this observation, we extend the earlier RL model to a game model and show that there exists defender policies that can be robust against any adversarial policy. We also derive a competitive baseline from the game theory model and compare it to the RL approach. However, we go further to exploit assumptions made in the MDP in the RL model and discover an attacker policy that overwhelms the defender. We use a double oracle approach to retrain the defender with episodes from this discovered attacker policy. This made the defender robust to the discovered attacker policy and no further harmful attacker policies were discovered. Overall, the adversarial RL and double oracle approach in RL are general techniques that are applicable to other RL usage in adversarial environments.
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