# Feature Engineering-Based Detection of Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in Source Code Using Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07981/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Devign: Effective Vulnerability Identification by Learning Comprehensive Program Semantics via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03496/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Machine Learning for Big Code and Naturalness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06182/) (2017)
- [Automated Vulnerability Detection in Source Code Using Deep Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04320/) (2018)
- [Automated software vulnerability detection with machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04497/) (2018)
- [Multi-class Skin Cancer Classification Architecture Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07520/) (2023)
- [Automated Vulnerability Detection in Source Code Using Quantum Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07525/) (2023)
- [Towards Automated Classification of Attackers' TTPs by combining NLP with ML Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08478/) (2022)
- [Handwritten Word Recognition using Deep Learning Approach: A Novel Way of Generating Handwritten Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07514/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning Approach for Classifying the Aggressive Comments on Social Media: Machine Translated Data Vs Real Life Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07484/) (2023)
- [Software Supply Chain Vulnerabilities Detection in Source Code: Performance Comparison between Traditional and Quantum Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08060/) (2023)
- [Survey of Automated Vulnerability Detection and Exploit Generation Techniques in Cyber Reasoning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.06162/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One of the most significant challenges in the field of software code auditing is the presence of vulnerabilities in software source code. Every year, more and more software flaws are discovered, either internally in proprietary code or publicly disclosed. These flaws are highly likely to be exploited and can lead to system compromise, data leakage, or denial of service. To create a large-scale machine learning system for function level vulnerability identification, we utilized a sizable dataset of C and C++ open-source code containing millions of functions with potential buffer overflow exploits. We have developed an efficient and scalable vulnerability detection method based on neural network models that learn features extracted from the source codes. The source code is first converted into an intermediate representation to remove unnecessary components and shorten dependencies. We maintain the semantic and syntactic information using state of the art word embedding algorithms such as GloVe and fastText. The embedded vectors are subsequently fed into neural networks such as LSTM, BiLSTM, LSTM Autoencoder, word2vec, BERT, and GPT2 to classify the possible vulnerabilities. We maintain the semantic and syntactic information using state of the art word embedding algorithms such as GloVe and fastText. The embedded vectors are subsequently fed into neural networks such as LSTM, BiLSTM, LSTM Autoencoder, word2vec, BERT, and GPT2 to classify the possible vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we have proposed a neural network model that can overcome issues associated with traditional neural networks. We have used evaluation metrics such as F1 score, precision, recall, accuracy, and total execution time to measure the performance. We have conducted a comparative analysis between results derived from features containing a minimal text representation and semantic and syntactic information.