Security of Language Models for Code: A Systematic Literature Review
Yuchen Chen, Weisong Sun, Chunrong Fang, Zhenpeng Chen, Yifei Ge, Tingxu Han, Quanjun Zhang, Yang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 2025
Language Models for Code (CodeLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for code-related tasks, outperforming traditional methods and standard machine learning approaches. However, these models are susceptible to security vulnerabilities, drawing increasing research attention from domains such as software engineering, AI, and cybersecurity. Despite the growing body of research focused on the security of CodeLMs, a comprehensive survey in this area remains absent. To address this gap, we systematically review 68 relevant papers, organizing them based on attack and defense strategies. Furthermore, we provide an overview of commonly used language models, datasets, and evaluation metrics, and highlight open source tools and promising directions for future research in securing CodeLMs.