HGVul: A Code Vulnerability Detection Method Based on Heterogeneous Source-Level Intermediate Representation

Abstract

Vulnerability detection on source code can prevent the risk of cyber-attacks as early as possible. However, lacking fine-grained analysis of the code has rendered the existing solutions still suffering from low performance; besides, the explosive growth of open-source projects has dramatically increased the complexity and diversity of the source code. This paper presents HGVul, a code vulnerability detection method based on heterogeneous intermediate representation of source code. The key of the proposed method is the fine-grained handling on heterogeneous source-level intermediate representation (SIR) without expert knowledge. It first extracts graph SIR of code with multiple syntactic-semantic information. Then, HGVul splits the SIR into different subgraphs according to various semantic relations, which are used to obtain semantic information conveyed by different types of edges. Next, a graph neural network with attention operations is deployed on each subgraph to learn representation, which captures the subtle effects from node neighbors on their representation. Finally, the learned code feature representations are utilized to perform vulnerability detection. Experiments are conducted on multiple datasets. The F1 of HGVul reaches 96.1% on the sample-balanced Big-Vul-VP dataset and 88.3% on the unbalanced Big-Vul dataset. Further experiments on actual open-source project datasets prove the better performance of HGVul.