Function Level Code Vulnerability Detection Method of Graph Neural Network Based on Extended AST

Abstract

With the increase of software vulnerabilities year by year,security problems are becoming more and more serious.Vulnerability detection of original code in the delivery stage of software project can effectively avoid security vulnerabilities in later run-time,and the discovery of code vulnerability depends on effective code characterization.The traditional characterization me-thods based on software metrics have weak correlation with vulnerabilities,so it is difficult to characterize vulnerability information efficiently.In recent years,machine learning has provided a new idea for intelligent discovery of vulnerabilities,but this method also has the problem of missing key information of code feature.To solve the above problems,control flow edge,data flow edge and next token edge are added to the traditional abstract syntax tree(AST) to generate an expanded abstract syntax tree (EXAST) graph structure,characterize the original code to better process the code structure information,and the word vector embedding model(word2vec) is used to initialize the code information into a numerical vector that the machine can recognize and learn.At the same time,the gate recurrent unit(GRU) is introduced into the traditional graph neural network(GNN) to build the model,which can alleviate the disappearance of the gradient,enhance the dissemination of long-term information in the graph structure to strengthen the timing relationship of code execution and improve the accuracy of vulnerability detection.Finally,the model is trained and tested on the SARD data sets to realize the function granularity code vulnerability detection,which can improve the accuracy of 32.54% and the F1 score of 44.99 compared with the traditional vulnerability detection method.Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the method for code vulnerability detection.

Keywords

• vulnerability mining|graph neural network|deep learning|abstract syntax tree|gate recurrent unit