Dao Hoang Mai’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

Improving and enhancing the effectiveness of software vulnerability detection methods is urgently needed today. In this study, we propose a new source code vulnerability detection method based on intelligent and advanced computational algorithms. It's a combination of four main processing techniques including (i) Source Embedding, (ii) Feature Learning, (iii) Resampling Data, and (iv) Classification. The Source Embedding method will perform the task of analyzing and standardizing the source code based on the Joern tool and the data mining algorithm. The Feature Learning model has the function of aggregating and extracting source code attribute based on node using machine learning and deep learning methods. The Resampling Data technique will perform equalization of the experimental dataset. Finally, the Classification model has the function of detecting source code vulnerabilities. The novelty and uniqueness of the new intelligent cognitive computing method is the combination and synchronous use of many different data extracting techniques to compute, represent, and extract the properties of the source code. With this new calculation method, many significant unusual properties and features of the vulnerability have been synthesized and extracted. To prove the superiority of the proposed method, we experiment to detect source code vulnerabilities based on the Verum dataset, details of this part are presented in the experimental section. The experimental results show that the method proposed in the paper has brought good results on all measures. These results have shown to be the best research results for the source code vulnerability detection task using the Verum dataset according to our survey to date. With such results, the proposal in this study is not only meaningful in terms of science but also in practical terms when the method of using intelligent cognitive computing techniques to analyze and evaluate source code has helped to improve the efficiency of the source code analysis and vulnerability detection process.