Closing the Gap: A User Study on the Real-world Usefulness of AI-powered Vulnerability Detection & Repair in the IDE

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Steenhoek, Benjamin, Sivaraman, Kalpathy, Gonzalez, Renata Saldivar, Mohylevskyy, Yevhen, Moghaddam, Roshanak Zilouchian, Le, Wei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916707758505984
author Steenhoek, Benjamin
Sivaraman, Kalpathy
Gonzalez, Renata Saldivar
Mohylevskyy, Yevhen
Moghaddam, Roshanak Zilouchian
Le, Wei
author_facet Steenhoek, Benjamin
Sivaraman, Kalpathy
Gonzalez, Renata Saldivar
Mohylevskyy, Yevhen
Moghaddam, Roshanak Zilouchian
Le, Wei
contents This paper presents the first empirical study of a vulnerability detection and fix tool with professional software developers on real projects that they own. We implemented DeepVulGuard, an IDE-integrated tool based on state-of-the-art detection and fix models, and show that it has promising performance on benchmarks of historic vulnerability data. DeepVulGuard scans code for vulnerabilities (including identifying the vulnerability type and vulnerable region of code), suggests fixes, provides natural-language explanations for alerts and fixes, leveraging chat interfaces. We recruited 17 professional software developers at Microsoft, observed their usage of the tool on their code, and conducted interviews to assess the tool's usefulness, speed, trust, relevance, and workflow integration. We also gathered detailed qualitative feedback on users' perceptions and their desired features. Study participants scanned a total of 24 projects, 6.9k files, and over 1.7 million lines of source code, and generated 170 alerts and 50 fix suggestions. We find that although state-of-the-art AI-powered detection and fix tools show promise, they are not yet practical for real-world use due to a high rate of false positives and non-applicable fixes. User feedback reveals several actionable pain points, ranging from incomplete context to lack of customization for the user's codebase. Additionally, we explore how AI features, including confidence scores, explanations, and chat interaction, can apply to vulnerability detection and fixing. Based on these insights, we offer practical recommendations for evaluating and deploying AI detection and fix models. Our code and data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26367139.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Closing the Gap: A User Study on the Real-world Usefulness of AI-powered Vulnerability Detection & Repair in the IDE
Steenhoek, Benjamin
Sivaraman, Kalpathy
Gonzalez, Renata Saldivar
Mohylevskyy, Yevhen
Moghaddam, Roshanak Zilouchian
Le, Wei
Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
This paper presents the first empirical study of a vulnerability detection and fix tool with professional software developers on real projects that they own. We implemented DeepVulGuard, an IDE-integrated tool based on state-of-the-art detection and fix models, and show that it has promising performance on benchmarks of historic vulnerability data. DeepVulGuard scans code for vulnerabilities (including identifying the vulnerability type and vulnerable region of code), suggests fixes, provides natural-language explanations for alerts and fixes, leveraging chat interfaces. We recruited 17 professional software developers at Microsoft, observed their usage of the tool on their code, and conducted interviews to assess the tool's usefulness, speed, trust, relevance, and workflow integration. We also gathered detailed qualitative feedback on users' perceptions and their desired features. Study participants scanned a total of 24 projects, 6.9k files, and over 1.7 million lines of source code, and generated 170 alerts and 50 fix suggestions. We find that although state-of-the-art AI-powered detection and fix tools show promise, they are not yet practical for real-world use due to a high rate of false positives and non-applicable fixes. User feedback reveals several actionable pain points, ranging from incomplete context to lack of customization for the user's codebase. Additionally, we explore how AI features, including confidence scores, explanations, and chat interaction, can apply to vulnerability detection and fixing. Based on these insights, we offer practical recommendations for evaluating and deploying AI detection and fix models. Our code and data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26367139.
title Closing the Gap: A User Study on the Real-world Usefulness of AI-powered Vulnerability Detection & Repair in the IDE
topic Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14306