Cross Project Software Vulnerability Detection via Domain Adaptation and Max-Margin Principle

Van Nguyen, Trung Le, John C. Grundy, Dinh Phung

Keywords: Cybersecurity, Cross Project Software Vulnerability Detection, Domain Adaptation, Max-Margin Principle.

Abstract: Software vulnerabilities (SVs) have become a common, serious and crucial concern due to the ubiquity of computer software. Many machine learning-based approaches have been proposed to solve the software vulnerability detection (SVD) problem. However, there still have been two significant issues presenting for SVD in terms of i) learning automatic representations to improve the predictive performance of SVD, and ii) tackling the scarcity of labeled vulnerabilities datasets that conventionally need laborious labeling effort by experts. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach to tackle these two crucial issues. We first exploit the automatic representation learning with deep domain adaptation for software vulnerability detection. We then propose a novel cross-domain kernel classifier leveraging the max-margin principle to significantly improve the transfer learning process of software vulnerabilities from labeled projects into unlabeled ones. The experimental results on real-world software datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2209.10406/code)