Intelligent mining vulnerabilities in python code snippets

Abstract

In the software development process, many developers learn from code snippets in the open-source community to implement specific functions. However, few people think about whether these code have vulnerabilities, which provides channels for developing unsafe programs. To this end, this paper constructs a source code snippets vulnerability mining system named PyVul based on deep learning to automatically detect the security of code snippets in the open source community. PyVul builds abstract syntax tree (AST) for the source code to extract its code feature, and then introduces the bidirectional long-term short-term memory (BiLSTM) neural network algorithm to detect vulnerability codes. If it is vulnerable code, the further constructed a multi-classification model could analyze the context discussion contents in associated threads, to classify the code vulnerability type based the content description. Compared with traditional detection methods, this method can identify vulnerable code and classify vulnerability type. The accuracy of the proposed model can reach 85%. PyVul also found 138 vulnerable code snippets in the real public open-source community. In the future, it can be used in the open-source community for vulnerable code auditing to assist users in safe development.