Finding an Optimal Set of Static Analyzers To Detect Software Vulnerabilities

Jiaqi He, Revan MacQueen, Natalie Bombardieri, Karim Ali, James R. Wright, Cristina Cifuentes

Abstract: Software vulnerabilities are ubiquitous and costly. To detect vulnerabilities earlier during development, organizations deploy a set of static analyzers to locate and eventually fix these vulnerabilities before releasing their software. Due to the prohibitive cost of running all available analyzers, organizations must run only a subset of all possible analyzers on their codebases. Choosing this set deterministically leaves recognizable gaps of vulnerability coverage. To overcome these challenges, we present Randomized Best Response (RBR), a method that computes an optimal randomization over size-bounded sets of available static analyzers. RBR models the relationship between malicious users and organizations as a leader-follower Stackelberg security game. Our solution focuses on software vulnerabilities due to their security implications when exploited by malicious users. Using 8 static analyzers for C/C++ and 8 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) vulnerability types, we show that RBR outperforms a set of natural baselines by always picking analyzers that achieve a higher benefit to the defender. Through a case study of a large system at Oracle, we show how RBR may be used in a real-world scenario.