UntrustVul: An Automated Approach for Identifying Untrustworthy Alerts in Vulnerability Detection Models

Machine learning (ML) has shown promise in vulnerability detection, but ML detectors may rely on irrelevant code features, causing them to highlight non-vulnerable lines as suspicious. Such misleading predictions increase developers' manual effort and may lead to incorrect patching strategies, motivating the need to identify untrustworthy predictions automatically. We present UntrustVul, an approach for detecting untrustworthy vulnerability predictions by identifying suspicious lines that are inherently unrelated to vulnerabilities. UntrustVul leverages patterns from historical vulnerable lines and flags predictions as untrustworthy when the highlighted lines neither match known vulnerability patterns nor influence lines that do. A line is considered vulnerability-irrelevant if it does not resemble historical vulnerabilities and all its successors in the data and control dependency graph are also vulnerability-irrelevant. The approach is designed conservatively to minimise misclassifying trustworthy predictions as untrustworthy. We evaluate UntrustVul on 115K predictions from four models across the BigVul, MegaVul, SARD, and PrimeVul datasets. Results show that UntrustVul achieves AUC scores of 70%-88% and F1-scores of 82%-94%, outperforming existing approaches by 6%-59% in AUC and 13%-92% in F1-score.