Vulnerability Analysis of Similar Code
Azin Piran, Che-Pin Chang, Amin Milani Fard · 2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS) · 2021
Studying frequent code vulnerabilities in similar code, such as clones, near-duplicates, forked projects, or libraries, can help in the automated detection of security flaws during the software development process. In this work we conduct an empirical study on vulnerabilities in C/C++ code to characterize security flaws and find out if the same vulnerabilities exist in applications that share similar code or have the same business logic/domain. We analyze a code vulnerability dataset including 315 projects with 3284 security issues in 10,880 functions. Our results show that vulnerable functions in 35% of the most occurring CWEs (software weaknesses types) have similar code, and 23% of projects with the same domain/category have the same vulnerabilities. We observe that the most prevalent vulnerabilities in similar code are Use After Free, Improper Access Control, Cryptographic Issues, 7PK - Security Features, DoubleFree, Cross-site Scripting, and Divide By Zero. These vulnerabilities are, however, less frequent compared to other CWEs across all subjects. Our results suggest that automated vulnerability detection tools that work based on code similarity or abstract patterns can be tailored more towards certain CWEs.