A security vulnerability predictor based on source code metrics

Abstract

Detecting security vulnerabilities in the source code of software systems is one of the most important challenges in the field of software security. We need an effective solution to discover and patch vulnerabilities before our valuable information is compromised. Security testing is a type of software testing that checks whether software is vulnerable to cyber attacks. This study aimed to pursue three main objectives: (1) The first goal is to identify the vulnerable functions of a C/C++ software program based on code metrics. This can reduce the cost of software security testing and also redirect the related activities to identified vulnerable functions rather than to the entire software, (2) The second goal is to identify the type of attack related to the vulnerability function, and (3) Finally, the ultimate goal is to analyze the relationship between code metrics and the vulnerabilities. This goal can help us understand which code structure is most likely to contain vulnerable code. This paper first aimed to create a comprehensive view of the source code of the target software using graph concepts. Second, a set of source code metrics and calculated by crawling on the related graph using the static analysis approach. Finally, the vulnerability prediction model presented in this paper is based on machine learning technique applied on metrics extracted from program source code. Compared to previous work, new achievements have been made in this paper. One of the most important ones is the very high accuracy detection of the proposed model in detecting the type of vulnerability. Moreover, 15 code metrics are used to predict vulnerabilities. Our analysis on feature importance indicates that what structure the software program code has, most likely, it will be vulnerable. Experimental results in 10 real projects (OpenSSL, SQLite, FreeType, LibTiff, Libxslt, Binutils, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, OpenSC, and rdesktop) indicated that the security testing predictor proposed in this paper could predict on average 89% of the really vulnerable functions of the source code and 86% of the vulnerability type of the detected functions correctly.