Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Identification on Data in the Wild

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Irsan, Ivana Clairine, Widyasari, Ratnadira, Zhang, Ting, Huang, Huihui, Thung, Ferdian, Li, Yikun, Shar, Lwin Khin, Ouh, Eng Lieh, Kang, Hong Jin, Lo, David
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914404941955072
author Irsan, Ivana Clairine
Widyasari, Ratnadira
Zhang, Ting
Huang, Huihui
Thung, Ferdian
Li, Yikun
Shar, Lwin Khin
Ouh, Eng Lieh
Kang, Hong Jin
Lo, David
author_facet Irsan, Ivana Clairine
Widyasari, Ratnadira
Zhang, Ting
Huang, Huihui
Thung, Ferdian
Li, Yikun
Shar, Lwin Khin
Ouh, Eng Lieh
Kang, Hong Jin
Lo, David
contents Attacks can exploit zero-day or one-day vulnerabilities that are not publicly disclosed. To detect these vulnerabilities, security researchers monitor development activities in open-source repositories to identify unreported security patches. The sheer volume of commits makes this task infeasible to accomplish manually. Consequently, security patch detectors commonly trained and evaluated on security patches linked from vulnerability reports in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). In this study, we assess the effectiveness of these detectors when applied in-the-wild. Our results show that models trained on NVD-derived data show substantially decreased performance, with decreases in F1-score of up to 90\% when tested on in-the-wild security patches, rendering them impractical for real-world use. An analysis comparing security patches identified in-the-wild and commits linked from NVD reveals that they can be easily distinguished from each other. Security patches associated with NVD have different distribution of commit messages, vulnerability types, and composition of changes. These differences suggest that NVD may be unsuitable as the \textit{sole} source of data for training models to detect security patches. We find that constructing a dataset that combines security patches from NVD data with a small subset of manually identified security patches can improve model robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17266
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Identification on Data in the Wild
Irsan, Ivana Clairine
Widyasari, Ratnadira
Zhang, Ting
Huang, Huihui
Thung, Ferdian
Li, Yikun
Shar, Lwin Khin
Ouh, Eng Lieh
Kang, Hong Jin
Lo, David
Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
Attacks can exploit zero-day or one-day vulnerabilities that are not publicly disclosed. To detect these vulnerabilities, security researchers monitor development activities in open-source repositories to identify unreported security patches. The sheer volume of commits makes this task infeasible to accomplish manually. Consequently, security patch detectors commonly trained and evaluated on security patches linked from vulnerability reports in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). In this study, we assess the effectiveness of these detectors when applied in-the-wild. Our results show that models trained on NVD-derived data show substantially decreased performance, with decreases in F1-score of up to 90\% when tested on in-the-wild security patches, rendering them impractical for real-world use. An analysis comparing security patches identified in-the-wild and commits linked from NVD reveals that they can be easily distinguished from each other. Security patches associated with NVD have different distribution of commit messages, vulnerability types, and composition of changes. These differences suggest that NVD may be unsuitable as the \textit{sole} source of data for training models to detect security patches. We find that constructing a dataset that combines security patches from NVD data with a small subset of manually identified security patches can improve model robustness.
title Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Identification on Data in the Wild
topic Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17266