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VuRLE: Automatic vulnerability detection and repair by learning from examples
Computer security ESORICS 2017: 22nd European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Oslo, Norway, September 11-15: Proceedings
  • MA SIQI, Singapore Management University
  • Ferdian THUNG, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Cong SUN
  • Robert H. DENG, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2017
Abstract

Vulnerability becomes a major threat to the security of many systems. Attackers can steal private information and perform harmful actions by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities often remain undetected for a long time as they may not affect typical systems’ functionalities. Furthermore, it is often difficult for a developer to fix a vulnerability correctly if he/she is not a security expert. To assist developers to deal with multiple types of vulnerabilities, we propose a new tool, called VuRLE, for automatic detection and repair of vulnerabilities. VuRLE (1) learns transformative edits and their contexts (i.e., code characterizing edit locations) from examples of vulnerable codes and their corresponding repaired codes; (2) clusters similar transformative edits; (3) extracts edit patterns and context patterns to create several repair templates for each cluster. VuRLE uses the context patterns to detect vulnerabilities, and customizes the corresponding edit patterns to repair them. We evaluate VuRLE on 279 vulnerabilities from 48 real-world applications. Under 10-fold cross validation, we compare VuRLE with another automatic repair tool, LASE. Our experiment shows that VuRLE successfully detects 183 out of 279 vulnerabilities, and repairs 101 of them, while LASE can only detect 58 vulnerabilities and repair 21 of them.

Keywords
  • Automated Template Generation,
  • Vulnerability Detection,
  • Automated Program Repair
ISBN
9783319663982
Identifier
10.1007/978-3-319-66399-9_13
Publisher
Springer
City or Country
Cham
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66399-9_13
Citation Information
MA SIQI, Ferdian THUNG, David LO, Cong SUN, et al.. "VuRLE: Automatic vulnerability detection and repair by learning from examples" Computer security ESORICS 2017: 22nd European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Oslo, Norway, September 11-15: Proceedings Vol. 10493 (2017) p. 229 - 246
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert-deng/325/