Vulnerability Root Cause Function Locating For Java Vulnerabilities

Software Composition Analysis has emerged as an essential solution for mitigating vulnerabilities within the dependencies of software projects. Reachability analysis has been increasingly leveraged to streamline vulnerability remediation procedures by prioritizing reachable vulnerabilities, which require the code-level root cause of vulnerabilities to perform reachability analysis. Notwithstanding, pinpointing the root cause leading to exploitation is laborious and resource-intensive, given the requisite manual oversight from specialists. To this end, we introduce root cause function Finder (RCFer), a solution capable of autonomously identifying root cause function utilizing semantic analysis of enriched vulnerability descriptions and source code. The top-10 outcomes successfully pin-point root cause functions for 73.81% of assessed vulnerabilities.