Example-based vulnerability detection and repair in Java code

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao

Abstract

The Java libraries JCA and JSSE offer cryptographic APIs to facilitate secure coding. When developers misuse some of the APIs, their code becomes vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, people built tools to detect security-API misuses via pattern matching. However, most tools do not (1) fix misuses or (2) allow users to extend tools' pattern sets. To overcome both limitations, we created Seader---an example-based approach to detect and repair security-API misuses. Given an exemplar (insecure, secure) code pair, Seader compares the snippets to infer any API-misuse template and corresponding fixing edit. Based on the inferred info, given a program, Seader performs inter-procedural static analysis to search for security-API misuses and to propose customized fixes.
For evaluation, we applied Seader to 28 (insecure, secure) code pairs; Seader successfully inferred 21 unique API-misuse templates and related fixes. With these (vulnerability, fix) patterns, we applied Seader to a program benchmark that has 86 known vulnerabilities. Seader detected vulnerabilities with 95% precision, 72% recall, and 82% F-score. We also applied Seader to 100 open-source projects and manually checked 77 suggested repairs; 76 of the repairs were correct. Seader can help developers correctly use security APIs.

Ying Zhang, Ya Xiao, Md Mahir Asef Kabir, Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, Na Meng: Example-based vulnerability detection and repair in Java code. ICPC 2022: 190-201