A Systematic Literature Review on Automated Software Vulnerability Detection Using Machine Learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, numerous Machine Learning (ML) models, including Deep Learning (DL) and classic ML models, have been developed to detect software vulnerabilities. However, there is a notable lack of comprehensive and systematic surveys that summarize, classify, and analyze the applications of these ML models in software vulnerability detection. This absence may lead to critical research areas being overlooked or under-represented, resulting in a skewed understanding of the current state of the art in software vulnerability detection. To close this gap, we propose a comprehensive and systematic literature review that characterizes the different properties of ML-based software vulnerability detection systems using six major Research Questions (RQs). Using a custom web scraper, our systematic approach involves extracting a set of studies from four widely used online digital libraries: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar. We manually analyzed the extracted studies to filter out irrelevant work unrelated to software vulnerability detection, followed by creating taxonomies and addressing RQs. Our analysis indicates a significant upward trend in applying ML techniques for software vulnerability detection over the past few years, with many studies published in recent years. Prominent conference venues include the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference, and the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), whereas Information and Software Technology (IST), Computers & Security (C&S), and Journal of Systems and Software (JSS) are the leading journal venues. Our results reveal that 39.1% of the subject studies use hybrid sources, whereas 37.6% of the subject studies utilize benchmark data for software vulnerability detection. Code-based data are the most commonly used data type among subject studies, with source code being the predominant subtype. Graph-based and token-based input representations are the most popular techniques, accounting for 57.2% and 24.6% of the subject studies, respectively. Among the input embedding techniques, graph embedding and token vector embedding are the most frequently used techniques, accounting for 32.6% and 29.7% of the subject studies. Additionally, 88.4% of the subject studies use DL models, with recurrent neural networks and graph neural networks being the most popular subcategories, whereas only 7.2% use classic ML models. Among the vulnerability types covered by the subject studies, CWE-119, CWE-20, and CWE-190 are the most frequent ones. In terms of tools used for software vulnerability detection, Keras with TensorFlow backend and PyTorch libraries are the most frequently used model-building tools, accounting for 42 studies for each. In addition, Joern is the most popular tool used for code representation, accounting for 24 studies. Finally, we summarize the challenges and future directions in the context of software vulnerability detection, providing valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in the field.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it