Automated identification of libraries from vulnerability data

Abstract

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) has gained traction in recent years with a number of commercial offerings from various companies. SCA involves vulnerability curation process where a group of security researchers, using various data sources, populate a database of open-source library vulnerabilities, which is used by a scanner to inform the end users of vulnerable libraries used by their applications. One of the data sources used is the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The key challenge faced by the security researchers here is in figuring out which libraries are related to each of the reported vulnerability in NVD. In this article, we report our design and implementation of a machine learning system to help identify the libraries related to each vulnerability in NVD.