Automated identification of libraries from vulnerability data

Abstract

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) has gained traction in recent years with a number of commercial offerings from various companies. SCA involves vulnerability curation process where a group of security researchers, using various data sources, populate a database of open-source library vulnerabilities, which is used by a scanner to inform the end users of vulnerable libraries used by their applications. One of the data sources used is the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The key challenge faced by the security researchers here is in figuring out which libraries are related to each of the reported vulnerability in NVD. In this article, we report our design and implementation of a machine learning system to help identify the libraries related to each vulnerability in NVD. The problem is that of extreme multi-label learning (XML), andwe developed our system using the state-of-the-art FastXML algorithm. Our system is iteratively executed, improving the performance of the model over time. At the time of writing, it achieves F1@1 score of 0.53 with average F1@k score for k = 1, 2, 3 of 0.51 (F1@k is the harmonic mean of precision@k and recall@k). It has been deployed in Veracode as part of a machine learning system that helps the security researchers identify the likelihood of web data items to be vulnerability-related. In addition, we present evaluation results of our feature engineering and the FastXML tree number used. Our work formulates and solves for the first time library name identification from NVD data as XML, and deploys the solution in a complete production system.