Developer's Roadmap to Design Software Vulnerability Detection Model Using Different AI Approaches

Automatic software vulnerability detection has caught the eyes of researchers as because software vulnerabilities are exploited vehemently causing major cyber-attacks. Thus, designing a vulnerability detector is an inevitable approach to eliminate vulnerabilities. With the advances of Natural language processing in the application of interpreting source code as text, AI approaches based on Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Graph Neural Network have impactful research works. The key requirement for developing an AI based vulnerability detector model from a developer perspective is to identify which AI model to adopt, availability of labelled dataset, how to represent essential feature and tokenizing the extracted feature vectors, specification of vulnerability coverage with detection granularity. Most of the literature review work explores AI approaches based on either Machine Learning or Deep Learning model. The existing literature work either highlight only feature representation technique or identifying granularity level and dataset. A qualitative comparative analysis on ML, DL, GNN based model is presented in this work to get a complete picture on VDM thus addressing the challenges of a researcher to choose suitable architecture, feature representation and processing required for designing a VDM. This work focuses on putting together all the essential bits required for designing an automated software vulnerability detection model using any various AI approaches.

Automated summary

Automatic software vulnerability detection has become a focus of research due to the increasing cyber-attacks caused by exploited software vulnerabilities. AI approaches based on Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Graph Neural Network have shown significant impact in this area.