Systematic Analysis of Deep Learning Model for Vulnerable Code Detection

Software vulnerabilities have become a serious problem with the emergence of new applications that contain potentially vulnerable or malicious code that can compromise the system. The growing volume and complexity of software source codes have opened a need for vulnerability detection methods to successfully predict malicious codes before being the prey of cyberattacks. As leveraging humans to check sources codes requires extensive time and resources and preexisting static code analyzers are unable to properly detect vulnerable codes. Thus, artificial intelligence techniques, mainly deep learning models, have gained traction to detect source code vulnerability. A systematic review is carried out to explore and understand the various deep learning methods employed for the task and their efficacy as a prediction model. Additionally, a summary of each process and its characteristics are examined and its implementation on specific data sets and their evaluation will be discussed.