Learning To Predict Vulnerabilities From Vulnerability-Fixes: A Machine Translation Approach

Vulnerability prediction refers to the problem of identifying the system components that are most likely to be vulnerable based on the information gained from historical data. Typically, vulnerability prediction is performed using manually identified features that are potentially linked with vulnerable code. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that existing approaches are ineffective when evaluated in realistic settings due to some unavoidable noise included in the historical data. To deal with this issue, we develop a prediction method using the encoder-decoder framework of machine translation that automatically learns the latent features (context, patterns, etc.) of code that are linked with vulnerabilities. The key idea of our approach is to learn from things we know, the past vulnerability fixes and their context. We evaluate our approach by comparing it with existing techniques on available releases of the three security-critical open source systems (Linux Kernel, OpenSSL, and Wireshark) with historical vulnerabilities that have been reported in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Our evaluation demonstrates that the prediction capability of our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art vulnerability prediction techniques (Software Metrics, Imports, Function Calls, and Text Mining) in both recall and precision values (yielding 4.7 times higher MCC values) under realistic training setting.