Challenging Machine Learning Algorithms in Predicting Vulnerable JavaScript Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ferenc, Rudolf, Hegedűs, Péter, Gyimesi, Péter, Antal, Gábor, Bán, Dénes, Gyimóthy, Tibor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ferenc, Rudolf
Hegedűs, Péter
Gyimesi, Péter
Antal, Gábor
Bán, Dénes
Gyimóthy, Tibor
author_facet Ferenc, Rudolf
Hegedűs, Péter
Gyimesi, Péter
Antal, Gábor
Bán, Dénes
Gyimóthy, Tibor
contents The rapid rise of cyber-crime activities and the growing number of devices threatened by them place software security issues in the spotlight. As around 90% of all attacks exploit known types of security issues, finding vulnerable components and applying existing mitigation techniques is a viable practical approach for fighting against cyber-crime. In this paper, we investigate how the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, including a popular deep learning algorithm, perform in predicting functions with possible security vulnerabilities in JavaScript programs. We applied 8 machine learning algorithms to build prediction models using a new dataset constructed for this research from the vulnerability information in public databases of the Node Security Project and the Snyk platform, and code fixing patches from GitHub. We used static source code metrics as predictors and an extensive grid-search algorithm to find the best performing models. We also examined the effect of various re-sampling strategies to handle the imbalanced nature of the dataset. The best performing algorithm was KNN, which created a model for the prediction of vulnerable functions with an F-measure of 0.76 (0.91 precision and 0.66 recall). Moreover, deep learning, tree and forest based classifiers, and SVM were competitive with F-measures over 0.70. Although the F-measures did not vary significantly with the re-sampling strategies, the distribution of precision and recall did change. No re-sampling seemed to produce models preferring high precision, while re-sampling strategies balanced the IR measures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Challenging Machine Learning Algorithms in Predicting Vulnerable JavaScript Functions
Ferenc, Rudolf
Hegedűs, Péter
Gyimesi, Péter
Antal, Gábor
Bán, Dénes
Gyimóthy, Tibor
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
The rapid rise of cyber-crime activities and the growing number of devices threatened by them place software security issues in the spotlight. As around 90% of all attacks exploit known types of security issues, finding vulnerable components and applying existing mitigation techniques is a viable practical approach for fighting against cyber-crime. In this paper, we investigate how the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, including a popular deep learning algorithm, perform in predicting functions with possible security vulnerabilities in JavaScript programs. We applied 8 machine learning algorithms to build prediction models using a new dataset constructed for this research from the vulnerability information in public databases of the Node Security Project and the Snyk platform, and code fixing patches from GitHub. We used static source code metrics as predictors and an extensive grid-search algorithm to find the best performing models. We also examined the effect of various re-sampling strategies to handle the imbalanced nature of the dataset. The best performing algorithm was KNN, which created a model for the prediction of vulnerable functions with an F-measure of 0.76 (0.91 precision and 0.66 recall). Moreover, deep learning, tree and forest based classifiers, and SVM were competitive with F-measures over 0.70. Although the F-measures did not vary significantly with the re-sampling strategies, the distribution of precision and recall did change. No re-sampling seemed to produce models preferring high precision, while re-sampling strategies balanced the IR measures.
title Challenging Machine Learning Algorithms in Predicting Vulnerable JavaScript Functions
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07213