♪ With a Little Help from My (LLM) Friends: Enhancing Static Analysis with LLMs to Detect Software Vulnerabilities

This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with static analysis tools, specifically Semgrep, to enhance vulnerability detection in Java applications. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate the performance of various LLMs in triaging security weaknesses identified by Semgrep. We also study how LLMs perform across different types of vulnerabilities and assess the impact of various prompt engineering strategies. Our results reveal that while some LLM models reduce the accuracy of baseline results with static analysis, they show a consistent improvement with each new model released. In particular, o1-mini significantly outperformed others in our experiments in terms of their accuracy and false positive reduction. Although LLMs might not be ready for prime time in vulnerability detection yet, this study highlights their growing potential to complement existing tools and paves the way for future research to further optimize LLM-based vulnerability detection systems.