Outside the Comfort Zone: Analysing LLM Capabilities in Software Vulnerability Detection

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16400v1
• Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 10:00:57 GMT
• Title: Outside the Comfort Zone: Analysing LLM Capabilities in Software Vulnerability Detection
• Authors: Yuejun Guo, Constantinos Patsakis, Qiang Hu, Qiang Tang, Fran Casino,
• Abstract summary: This paper thoroughly analyses large language models' capabilities in detecting vulnerabilities within source code. We evaluate the performance of six open-source models that are specifically trained for vulnerability detection against six general-purpose LLMs.
• Score: 9.652886240532741
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The significant increase in software production driven by automation and faster development lifecycles has resulted in a corresponding surge in software vulnerabilities. In parallel, the evolving landscape of software vulnerability detection, highlighting the shift from traditional methods to machine learning and large language models (LLMs), provides massive opportunities at the cost of resource-demanding computations. This paper thoroughly analyses LLMs' capabilities in detecting vulnerabilities within source code by testing models beyond their usual applications to study their potential in cybersecurity tasks. We evaluate the performance of six open-source models that are specifically trained for vulnerability detection against six general-purpose LLMs, three of which were further fine-tuned on a dataset that we compiled. Our dataset, alongside five state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, were used to create a pipeline to leverage a binary classification task, namely classifying code into vulnerable and non-vulnerable. The findings highlight significant variations in classification accuracy across benchmarks, revealing the critical influence of fine-tuning in enhancing the detection capabilities of small LLMs over their larger counterparts, yet only in the specific scenarios in which they were trained. Further experiments and analysis also underscore the issues with current benchmark datasets, particularly around mislabeling and their impact on model training and performance, which raises concerns about the current state of practice. We also discuss the road ahead in the field suggesting strategies for improved model training and dataset curation.

Related papers

• SIaM: Self-Improving Code-Assisted Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models [54.78329741186446]
  We propose a novel paradigm that uses a code-based critic model to guide steps including question-code data construction, quality control, and complementary evaluation. Experiments across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks in English and Chinese demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-28T06:33:03Z)
• Exploring Automatic Cryptographic API Misuse Detection in the Era of LLMs [60.32717556756674]
  This paper introduces a systematic evaluation framework to assess Large Language Models in detecting cryptographic misuses. Our in-depth analysis of 11,940 LLM-generated reports highlights that the inherent instabilities in LLMs can lead to over half of the reports being false positives. The optimized approach achieves a remarkable detection rate of nearly 90%, surpassing traditional methods and uncovering previously unknown misuses in established benchmarks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-23T15:31:26Z)
• Security Vulnerability Detection with Multitask Self-Instructed Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models [8.167614500821223]
  We introduce MSIVD, multitask self-instructed fine-tuning for vulnerability detection, inspired by chain-of-thought prompting and LLM self-instruction. Our experiments demonstrate that MSIVD achieves superior performance, outperforming the highest LLM-based vulnerability detector baseline (LineVul) with a F1 score of 0.92 on the BigVul dataset, and 0.48 on the PreciseBugs dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-09T19:18:05Z)
• Advancing Anomaly Detection: Non-Semantic Financial Data Encoding with LLMs [49.57641083688934]
  We introduce a novel approach to anomaly detection in financial data using Large Language Models (LLMs) embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs contribute valuable information to anomaly detection as our models outperform the baselines.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-05T20:19:09Z)
• Unveiling the Misuse Potential of Base Large Language Models via In-Context Learning [61.2224355547598]
  Open-sourcing of large language models (LLMs) accelerates application development, innovation, and scientific progress. Our investigation exposes a critical oversight in this belief. By deploying carefully designed demonstrations, our research demonstrates that base LLMs could effectively interpret and execute malicious instructions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-16T13:22:54Z)
• An Empirical Study of Automated Vulnerability Localization with Large Language Models [21.84971967029474]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in various domains, yet their effectiveness in vulnerability localization remains underexplored. Our investigation encompasses 10+ leading LLMs suitable for code analysis, including ChatGPT and various open-source models. We explore the efficacy of these LLMs using 4 distinct paradigms: zero-shot learning, one-shot learning, discriminative fine-tuning, and generative fine-tuning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-30T08:42:10Z)
• Vulnerability Detection with Code Language Models: How Far Are We? [40.455600722638906]
  PrimeVul is a new dataset for training and evaluating code LMs for vulnerability detection. It incorporates a novel set of data labeling techniques that achieve comparable label accuracy to human-verified benchmarks. It also implements a rigorous data de-duplication and chronological data splitting strategy to mitigate data leakage issues.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-27T14:34:29Z)
• Characterization of Large Language Model Development in the Datacenter [55.9909258342639]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have presented impressive performance across several transformative tasks. However, it is non-trivial to efficiently utilize large-scale cluster resources to develop LLMs. We present an in-depth characterization study of a six-month LLM development workload trace collected from our GPU datacenter Acme.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-12T13:31:14Z)
• How Far Have We Gone in Vulnerability Detection Using Large Language Models [15.09461331135668]
  We introduce a comprehensive vulnerability benchmark VulBench. This benchmark aggregates high-quality data from a wide range of CTF challenges and real-world applications. We find that several LLMs outperform traditional deep learning approaches in vulnerability detection.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-21T08:20:39Z)
• Understanding the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Detecting Security Vulnerabilities [12.82645410161464]
  We evaluate the effectiveness of 16 pre-trained Large Language Models on 5,000 code samples from five diverse security datasets. Overall, LLMs show modest effectiveness in detecting vulnerabilities, obtaining an average accuracy of 62.8% and F1 score of 0.71 across datasets. We find that advanced prompting strategies that involve step-by-step analysis significantly improve performance of LLMs on real-world datasets in terms of F1 score (by upto 0.18 on average)
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-16T13:17:20Z)
• VELVET: a noVel Ensemble Learning approach to automatically locate VulnErable sTatements [62.93814803258067]
  This paper presents VELVET, a novel ensemble learning approach to locate vulnerable statements in source code. Our model combines graph-based and sequence-based neural networks to successfully capture the local and global context of a program graph. VELVET achieves 99.6% and 43.6% top-1 accuracy over synthetic data and real-world data, respectively.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-12-20T22:45:27Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.