Comparing Unidirectional, Bidirectional, and Word2vec Models for Discovering Vulnerabilities in Compiled Lifted Code

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: McCully, Gary A., Hastings, John D., Xu, Shengjie, Fortier, Adam
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author McCully, Gary A.
Hastings, John D.
Xu, Shengjie
Fortier, Adam
author_facet McCully, Gary A.
Hastings, John D.
Xu, Shengjie
Fortier, Adam
contents Ransomware and other forms of malware cause significant financial and operational damage to organizations by exploiting long-standing and often difficult-to-detect software vulnerabilities. To detect vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows in compiled code, this research investigates the application of unidirectional transformer-based embeddings, specifically GPT-2. Using a dataset of LLVM functions, we trained a GPT-2 model to generate embeddings, which were subsequently used to build LSTM neural networks to differentiate between vulnerable and non-vulnerable code. Our study reveals that embeddings from the GPT-2 model significantly outperform those from bidirectional models of BERT and RoBERTa, achieving an accuracy of 92.5% and an F1-score of 89.7%. LSTM neural networks were developed with both frozen and unfrozen embedding model layers. The model with the highest performance was achieved when the embedding layers were unfrozen. Further, the research finds that, in exploring the impact of different optimizers within this domain, the SGD optimizer demonstrates superior performance over Adam. Overall, these findings reveal important insights into the potential of unidirectional transformer-based approaches in enhancing cybersecurity defenses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_17513
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Comparing Unidirectional, Bidirectional, and Word2vec Models for Discovering Vulnerabilities in Compiled Lifted Code
McCully, Gary A.
Hastings, John D.
Xu, Shengjie
Fortier, Adam
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
D.4.6; I.2.6; I.5.1
Ransomware and other forms of malware cause significant financial and operational damage to organizations by exploiting long-standing and often difficult-to-detect software vulnerabilities. To detect vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows in compiled code, this research investigates the application of unidirectional transformer-based embeddings, specifically GPT-2. Using a dataset of LLVM functions, we trained a GPT-2 model to generate embeddings, which were subsequently used to build LSTM neural networks to differentiate between vulnerable and non-vulnerable code. Our study reveals that embeddings from the GPT-2 model significantly outperform those from bidirectional models of BERT and RoBERTa, achieving an accuracy of 92.5% and an F1-score of 89.7%. LSTM neural networks were developed with both frozen and unfrozen embedding model layers. The model with the highest performance was achieved when the embedding layers were unfrozen. Further, the research finds that, in exploring the impact of different optimizers within this domain, the SGD optimizer demonstrates superior performance over Adam. Overall, these findings reveal important insights into the potential of unidirectional transformer-based approaches in enhancing cybersecurity defenses.
title Comparing Unidirectional, Bidirectional, and Word2vec Models for Discovering Vulnerabilities in Compiled Lifted Code
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
D.4.6; I.2.6; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17513