Dazzle: Using Optimized Generative Adversarial Networks to Address Security Data Class Imbalance Issue

Background: Machine learning techniques have been widely used and demonstrate promising performance in many software security tasks such as software vulnerability prediction. However, the class ratio within software vulnerability datasets is often highly imbalanced (since the percentage of observed vulnerability is usually very low). Goal: To help security practitioners address software security data class imbalanced issues and further help build better prediction models with resampled datasets. Method: We introduce an approach called Dazzle which is an optimized version of conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks with gradient penalty (cWGAN-GP). Dazzle explores the architecture hyperparameters of cWGAN-GP with a novel optimizer called Bayesian Optimization. We use Dazzle to generate minority class samples to resample the original imbalanced training dataset. Results: We evaluate Dazzle with three software security datasets, i.e., Moodle vulnerable files, Ambari bug reports, and JavaScript function code. We show that Dazzle is practical to use and demonstrates promising improvement over existing state-of-the-art oversampling techniques such as SMOTE (e.g., with an average of about 60% improvement rate over SMOTE in recall among all datasets). Conclusion: Based on this study, we would suggest the use of optimized GANs as an alternative method for security vulnerability data class imbalanced issues.