Maximal Divergence Sequential Autoencoder for Binary Software Vulnerability Detection

Tue Le, Tuan Nguyen, Trung Le, Dinh Phung, Paul Montague, Olivier De Vel, Lizhen Qu

Abstract: Due to the sharp increase in the severity of the threat imposed by software vulnerabilities, the detection of vulnerabilities in binary code has become an important concern in the software industry, such as the embedded systems industry, and in the field of computer security. However, most of the work in binary code vulnerability detection has relied on handcrafted features which are manually chosen by a select few, knowledgeable domain experts. In this paper, we attempt to alleviate this severe binary vulnerability detection bottleneck by leveraging recent advances in deep learning representations and propose the Maximal Divergence Sequential Auto-Encoder. In particular, latent codes representing vulnerable and non-vulnerable binaries are encouraged to be maximally divergent, while still being able to maintain crucial information from the original binaries. We conducted extensive experiments to compare and contrast our proposed methods with the baselines, and the results show that our proposed methods outperform the baselines in all performance measures of interest.

Keywords: Vulnerabilities Detection, Sequential Auto-Encoder, Separable Representation

TL;DR: We propose a novel method named Maximal Divergence Sequential Auto-Encoder that leverages Variational AutoEncoder representation for binary code vulnerability detection.