HALURust: Exploiting Hallucinations of Large Language Models to Detect Vulnerabilities in Rust

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luo, Yu, Zhou, Han, Zhang, Mengtao, De La Rosa, Dylan, Ahmed, Hafsa, Xu, Weifeng, Xu, Dianxiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Luo, Yu
Zhou, Han
Zhang, Mengtao
De La Rosa, Dylan
Ahmed, Hafsa
Xu, Weifeng
Xu, Dianxiang
author_facet Luo, Yu
Zhou, Han
Zhang, Mengtao
De La Rosa, Dylan
Ahmed, Hafsa
Xu, Weifeng
Xu, Dianxiang
contents As an emerging programming language, Rust has rapidly gained popularity and recognition among developers due to its strong emphasis on safety. It employs a unique ownership system and safe concurrency practices to ensure robust safety. Despite these safeguards, security in Rust still presents challenges. Since 2018, 442 Rust-related vulnerabilities have been reported in real-world applications. The limited availability of data has resulted in existing vulnerability detection tools performing poorly in real-world scenarios, often failing to adapt to new and complex vulnerabilities. This paper introduces HALURust, a novel framework that leverages hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) to detect vulnerabilities in real-world Rust scenarios. HALURust leverages LLMs' strength in natural language generation by transforming code into detailed vulnerability analysis reports. The key innovation lies in prompting the LLM to always assume the presence of a vulnerability. If the code sample is vulnerable, the LLM provides an accurate analysis; if not, it generates a hallucinated report. By fine-tuning LLMs on these hallucinations, HALURust can effectively distinguish between vulnerable and non-vulnerable code samples. HALURust was evaluated on a dataset of 81 real-world vulnerabilities, covering 447 functions and 18,691 lines of code across 54 applications. It outperformed existing methods, achieving an F1 score of 77.3%, with over 10% improvement. The hallucinated report-based fine-tuning improved detection by 20\% compared to traditional code-based fine-tuning. Additionally, HALURust effectively adapted to unseen vulnerabilities and other programming languages, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HALURust: Exploiting Hallucinations of Large Language Models to Detect Vulnerabilities in Rust
Luo, Yu
Zhou, Han
Zhang, Mengtao
De La Rosa, Dylan
Ahmed, Hafsa
Xu, Weifeng
Xu, Dianxiang
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
As an emerging programming language, Rust has rapidly gained popularity and recognition among developers due to its strong emphasis on safety. It employs a unique ownership system and safe concurrency practices to ensure robust safety. Despite these safeguards, security in Rust still presents challenges. Since 2018, 442 Rust-related vulnerabilities have been reported in real-world applications. The limited availability of data has resulted in existing vulnerability detection tools performing poorly in real-world scenarios, often failing to adapt to new and complex vulnerabilities. This paper introduces HALURust, a novel framework that leverages hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) to detect vulnerabilities in real-world Rust scenarios. HALURust leverages LLMs' strength in natural language generation by transforming code into detailed vulnerability analysis reports. The key innovation lies in prompting the LLM to always assume the presence of a vulnerability. If the code sample is vulnerable, the LLM provides an accurate analysis; if not, it generates a hallucinated report. By fine-tuning LLMs on these hallucinations, HALURust can effectively distinguish between vulnerable and non-vulnerable code samples. HALURust was evaluated on a dataset of 81 real-world vulnerabilities, covering 447 functions and 18,691 lines of code across 54 applications. It outperformed existing methods, achieving an F1 score of 77.3%, with over 10% improvement. The hallucinated report-based fine-tuning improved detection by 20\% compared to traditional code-based fine-tuning. Additionally, HALURust effectively adapted to unseen vulnerabilities and other programming languages, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities.
title HALURust: Exploiting Hallucinations of Large Language Models to Detect Vulnerabilities in Rust
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10793