Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Localization: An Empirical Study and LLM-Based Solution

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Haoran, Zhi, Chen, Han, Junxiao, Zhao, Xinkui, Yin, Jianwei, Deng, Shuiguang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Xu, Haoran
Zhi, Chen
Han, Junxiao
Zhao, Xinkui
Yin, Jianwei
Deng, Shuiguang
author_facet Xu, Haoran
Zhi, Chen
Han, Junxiao
Zhao, Xinkui
Yin, Jianwei
Deng, Shuiguang
contents Open-source software vulnerability patch detection is a critical component for maintaining software security and ensuring software supply chain integrity. Traditional manual detection methods face significant scalability challenges when processing large volumes of commit histories, while being prone to human errors and omissions. Existing automated approaches, including heuristic-based methods and pre-trained model solutions, suffer from limited accuracy, poor generalization capabilities, and inherent methodological constraints that hinder their practical deployment. To address these fundamental challenges, this paper conducts a comprehensive empirical study of existing vulnerability patch detection methods, revealing four key insights that guide the design of effective solutions: the critical impact of search space reduction, the superiority of pre-trained semantic understanding over architectural complexity, the temporal limitations of web crawling approaches, and the advantages of knowledge-driven methods. Based on these insights, we propose a novel two-stage framework that combines version-driven candidate filtering with large language model-based multi-round dialogue voting to achieve accurate and efficient vulnerability patch identification. Extensive experiments on a dataset containing 750 real vulnerabilities demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15777
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Localization: An Empirical Study and LLM-Based Solution
Xu, Haoran
Zhi, Chen
Han, Junxiao
Zhao, Xinkui
Yin, Jianwei
Deng, Shuiguang
Software Engineering
Open-source software vulnerability patch detection is a critical component for maintaining software security and ensuring software supply chain integrity. Traditional manual detection methods face significant scalability challenges when processing large volumes of commit histories, while being prone to human errors and omissions. Existing automated approaches, including heuristic-based methods and pre-trained model solutions, suffer from limited accuracy, poor generalization capabilities, and inherent methodological constraints that hinder their practical deployment. To address these fundamental challenges, this paper conducts a comprehensive empirical study of existing vulnerability patch detection methods, revealing four key insights that guide the design of effective solutions: the critical impact of search space reduction, the superiority of pre-trained semantic understanding over architectural complexity, the temporal limitations of web crawling approaches, and the advantages of knowledge-driven methods. Based on these insights, we propose a novel two-stage framework that combines version-driven candidate filtering with large language model-based multi-round dialogue voting to achieve accurate and efficient vulnerability patch identification. Extensive experiments on a dataset containing 750 real vulnerabilities demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches.
title Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Localization: An Empirical Study and LLM-Based Solution
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15777