SoK: Understanding (New) Security Issues Across AI4Code Use Cases
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18456v1
- Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:13:19 GMT
- Title: SoK: Understanding (New) Security Issues Across AI4Code Use Cases
- Authors: Qilong Wu, Taoran Li, Tianyang Zhou, Varun Chandrasekaran,
- Abstract summary: This SoK surveys the landscape of AI4Code security across three core applications.<n>Insecure patterns persist in code generation, vulnerability detection is brittle to semantic-preserving attacks, fine-tuning often misaligns security objectives.<n>We call for a shift toward security-first AI4Code, where vulnerability mitigation and robustness are embedded throughout the development life cycle.
- Score: 13.582240392749412
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: AI-for-Code (AI4Code) systems are reshaping software engineering, with tools like GitHub Copilot accelerating code generation, translation, and vulnerability detection. Alongside these advances, however, security risks remain pervasive: insecure outputs, biased benchmarks, and susceptibility to adversarial manipulation undermine their reliability. This SoK surveys the landscape of AI4Code security across three core applications, identifying recurring gaps: benchmark dominance by Python and toy problems, lack of standardized security datasets, data leakage in evaluation, and fragile adversarial robustness. A comparative study of six state-of-the-art models illustrates these challenges: insecure patterns persist in code generation, vulnerability detection is brittle to semantic-preserving attacks, fine-tuning often misaligns security objectives, and code translation yields uneven security benefits. From this analysis, we distill three forward paths: embedding secure-by-default practices in code generation, building robust and comprehensive detection benchmarks, and leveraging translation as a route to security-enhanced languages. We call for a shift toward security-first AI4Code, where vulnerability mitigation and robustness are embedded throughout the development life cycle.
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