Embedding Code Contexts for Cryptographic API Suggestion: New Methodologies and Comparisons

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, Wenjia Song

Abstract

Despite recent research efforts, the vision of automatic code generation through API recommendation has not been realized. Accuracy and expressiveness challenges of API recommendation needs to be systematically addressed. We present a new neural network-based approach, Multi-HyLSTM for API recommendation --targeting cryptography-related code. Multi-HyLSTM leverages program analysis to guide the API embedding and recommendation. By analyzing the data dependence paths of API methods, we train embedding and specialize a multi-path neural network architecture for API recommendation tasks that accurately predict the next API method call. We address two previously unreported programming language-specific challenges, differentiating functionally similar APIs and capturing low-frequency long-range influences. Our results confirm the effectiveness of our design choices, including program-analysis-guided embedding, multi-path code suggestion architecture, and low-frequency long-range-enhanced sequence learning, with high accuracy on top-1 recommendations. We achieve a top-1 accuracy of 91.41% compared with 77.44% from the state-of-the-art tool SLANG. In an analysis of 245 test cases, compared with the commercial tool Codota, we achieve a top-1 recommendation accuracy of 88.98%, which is significantly better than Codota's accuracy of 64.90%. We publish our data and code as a large Java cryptographic code dataset.