Identifying vulnerabilities in the source code is essential to protect the software systems from cyber security attacks. It, however, is also a challenging step that requires specialized expertise in security and code representation. To this end, we aim to develop a general, practical, and programming language-independent model capable of running on various source codes and libraries without difficulty. Therefore, we consider vulnerability detection as an inductive text classification problem and propose ReGVD, a simple yet effective graph neural network-based model for the problem. In particular, ReGVD views each raw source code as a flat sequence of tokens to build a graph, wherein node features are initialized by only the token embedding layer of a pre-trained programming language (PL) model. ReGVD then leverages residual connection among GNN layers and examines a mixture of graph-level sum and max poolings to return a graph embedding for the source code. ReGVD outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models and obtains the highest accuracy on the real-world benchmark dataset from CodeXGLUE for vulnerability detection. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/daiquocnguyen/GNN-ReGVD}.
@article{arxiv.2110.07317,
title = {ReGVD: Revisiting Graph Neural Networks for Vulnerability Detection},
author = {Van-Anh Nguyen and Dai Quoc Nguyen and Van Nguyen and Trung Le and Quan Hung Tran and Dinh Phung},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.07317},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to ICSE 2022 (Demonstrations). The first two authors contributed equally to this work