Fine-grained vulnerability detection for medical sensor systems

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The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the healthcare system by connecting medical sensors to the internet, while also posing challenges to the security of medical sensor networks (MSN). Given the extreme sensitivity of medical data, any vulnerability may result in data breaches and misuse, impacting patient safety and privacy. Therefore, safeguarding MSN security is critical. As medical sensor devices rely on smart healthcare software systems for data management and communication, precisely detecting system code vulnerabilities is essential to ensuring network security. Effective software vulnerability detection targets two key objectives: (i) achieving high accuracy and (ii) directly identifying vulnerable code lines for developers to fix. To address these challenges, we introduce Vulcoder, a novel vulnerability-oriented, encoder-driven model based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) architecture. We propose a one-to-one mapping function to capture code semantics through abstract syntax trees (AST). Combined with multi-head attention, Vulcoder achieves precise function- and line-level detection of software vulnerabilities in MSN. This accelerates the vulnerability remediation process, thereby strengthening network security. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that Vulcoder outperforms previous models in identifying vulnerabilities within MSN. Specifically, it achieves a 1%–419% improvement in function-level prediction F1 scores and a 12.5%–380% increase in line-level localization precision. Therefore, Vulcoder helps enhance security defenses and safeguard patient privacy in MSN, facilitating the development of smart healthcare.