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Using semantic templates to study vulnerabilities recorded in large software repositories

Published: 02 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Software repositories are rich sources of information about vulnerabilities that occur during a product's lifecycle. Although available, such information is scattered across numerous databases. Furthermore, in large software repositories, a single vulnerability may span across multiple components and have multidimensional interactions with other vulnerabilities. Thus, identifying the patterns of vulnerability occurrence in a larger context of software development continues to be an open problem. Here we present findings from our study of vulnerable software components using an ontology-guided analysis of vulnerabilities recorded in a software project's code repository. In this approach, a semantic template for each type of vulnerability is created from information in the Common Weakness Enumeration dictionary. Next, known vulnerabilities and related concepts in the repository are tagged with concepts from the template. Based on the characteristics of the resources affected by these vulnerabilities, other similar resources in the software can be identified for closer inspection and verification. We present results from our study of vulnerabilities in the Apache web server.

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  • (2024)Formally Modeled Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs)Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3691621.3694938(88-93)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding ConventionsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.325688611(25735-25754)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)iDetect for vulnerability detection in internet of things operating systems using machine learningScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-022-21325-x12:1Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        SESS '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems
        May 2010
        83 pages
        ISBN:9781605589657
        DOI:10.1145/1809100
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 02 May 2010

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        Author Tags

        1. CVE
        2. CWE
        3. buffer overflow
        4. fix patterns
        5. ontology
        6. semantic template
        7. software repository
        8. vulnerability

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        View all
        • (2024)Formally Modeled Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs)Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3691621.3694938(88-93)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
        • (2023)A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding ConventionsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.325688611(25735-25754)Online publication date: 2023
        • (2022)iDetect for vulnerability detection in internet of things operating systems using machine learningScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-022-21325-x12:1Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
        • (2021)The Presence, Trends, and Causes of Security Vulnerabilities in Operating Systems of IoT’s Low-End DevicesSensors10.3390/s2107232921:7(2329)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2021
        • (2019)Towards a Structured Specification of Coding Conventions2019 IEEE 24th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC)10.1109/PRDC47002.2019.00047(168-16809)Online publication date: Dec-2019
        • (2019)Embedding and Predicting Software Security Entity Relationships: A Knowledge Graph Based ApproachNeural Information Processing10.1007/978-3-030-36718-3_5(50-63)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2019
        • (2018)Toward Validation of Textual Information Retrieval Techniques for Software WeaknessesDatabase and Expert Systems Applications10.1007/978-3-319-99133-7_22(265-277)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2018
        • (2017)A Catalog of Security Architecture Weaknesses2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW)10.1109/ICSAW.2017.25(220-223)Online publication date: Apr-2017
        • (2017)Software component and the semantic WebJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2016.11.028125:C(152-169)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
        • (2016)The Bugs Framework (BF): A Structured Approach to Express Bugs2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS.2016.29(175-182)Online publication date: Aug-2016
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