On the Effectiveness of Function-Level Vulnerability Detectors for Inter-Procedural Vulnerabilities

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09767v2
• Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2024 10:36:40 GMT
• Title: On the Effectiveness of Function-Level Vulnerability Detectors for Inter-Procedural Vulnerabilities
• Authors: Zhen Li, Ning Wang, Deqing Zou, Yating Li, Ruqian Zhang, Shouhuai Xu, Chao Zhang, Hai Jin
• Abstract summary: 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.
• Score: 28.57872406228216
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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