Who Said CVE? How Vulnerability Identifiers Are Mentioned by Humans, Bots, and Agents in Pull Requests

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rooijendijk, Pien, Treude, Christoph, Wessel, Mairieli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Rooijendijk, Pien
Treude, Christoph
Wessel, Mairieli
author_facet Rooijendijk, Pien
Treude, Christoph
Wessel, Mairieli
contents Vulnerability identifiers such as CVE, CWE, and GHSA are standardised references to known software security issues, yet their use in practice is not well understood. This paper compares vulnerability ID use in GitHub pull requests authored by autonomous agents, bots, and human developers. Using the AIDev pop dataset and an augmented set of pull requests from the same repositories, we analyse who mentions vulnerability identifiers and where they appear. Bots account for around 69.1% of all mentions, usually adding few identifiers in pull request descriptions, while human and agent mentions are rarer but span more locations. Qualitative analysis shows that bots mainly reference identifiers in automated dependency updates and audits, whereas humans and agents use them to support fixes, maintenance, and discussion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who Said CVE? How Vulnerability Identifiers Are Mentioned by Humans, Bots, and Agents in Pull Requests
Rooijendijk, Pien
Treude, Christoph
Wessel, Mairieli
Software Engineering
Vulnerability identifiers such as CVE, CWE, and GHSA are standardised references to known software security issues, yet their use in practice is not well understood. This paper compares vulnerability ID use in GitHub pull requests authored by autonomous agents, bots, and human developers. Using the AIDev pop dataset and an augmented set of pull requests from the same repositories, we analyse who mentions vulnerability identifiers and where they appear. Bots account for around 69.1% of all mentions, usually adding few identifiers in pull request descriptions, while human and agent mentions are rarer but span more locations. Qualitative analysis shows that bots mainly reference identifiers in automated dependency updates and audits, whereas humans and agents use them to support fixes, maintenance, and discussion.
title Who Said CVE? How Vulnerability Identifiers Are Mentioned by Humans, Bots, and Agents in Pull Requests
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19636