Effective Vulnerable Function Identification based on CVE Description Empowered by Large Language Models

Open-source software (OSS) has profoundly transformed the software development paradigm by facilitating effortless code reuse. However, in recent years, there has been an alarming increase in disclosed vulnerabilities within OSS, posing significant security risks to downstream users. Therefore, analyzing existing vulnerabilities and precisely assessing their threats to downstream applications become pivotal. Plenty of efforts have been made recently towards this problem, such as vulnerability reachability analysis and vulnerability reproduction. The key to these tasks is identifying the vulnerable function (i.e., the function where the root cause of a vulnerability resides). However, public vulnerability datasets (e.g., NVD) rarely include this information as pinpointing the exact vulnerable functions remains to be a longstanding challenge.