Assessing the Effectiveness of ChatGPT in Secure Code Development: A Systematic Literature Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) maintained by OpenAI, has demonstrated a remarkable ability to seemingly comprehend and contextually generate text. Among its myriad applications, its capability to autonomously generate and analyze computer code stands out as particularly promising. This functionality has piqued substantial interest due to its potential to streamline the software development process. However, this technological advancement also brings to the forefront significant apprehensions concerning the security of code produced by LLMs. In this article, we survey recent research that examines the use of ChatGPT to generate secure code, detect vulnerabilities in code, or perform other tasks related to secure code development. Beyond categorizing and synthesizing these studies, we identify important insights into ChatGPT’s potential impact on secure programming. Key findings indicate that while ChatGPT shows great promise as an aid in writing secure code, challenges remain. Its effectiveness varies across security tasks, depending on the context of experimentation (programming language, CWE, code length, etc.) and the benchmark used for comparison–whether against other LLMs, traditional analysis tools, or its own versions. The overall trend indicates that GPT-4 consistently surpasses its predecessor in most tasks.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".