VulRepair: a T5-based automated software vulnerability repair

As software vulnerabilities grow in volume and complexity, researchers proposed various Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches to help under-resourced security analysts to find, detect, and localize vulnerabilities. However, security analysts still have to spend a huge amount of effort to manually fix or repair such vulnerable functions. Recent work proposed an NMT-based Automated Vulnerability Repair, but it is still far from perfect due to various limitations. In this paper, we propose VulRepair, a T5-based automated software vulnerability repair approach that leverages the pre-training and BPE components to address various technical limitations of prior work. Through an extensive experiment with over 8,482 vulnerability fixes from 1,754 real-world software projects, we find that our VulRepair achieves a Perfect Prediction of 44%, which is 13%-21% more accurate than competitive baseline approaches. These results lead us to conclude that our VulRepair is considerably more accurate than two baseline approaches, highlighting the substantial advancement of NMT-based Automated Vulnerability Repairs. Our additional investigation also shows that our VulRepair can accurately repair as many as 745 out of 1,706 real-world well-known vulnerabilities (e.g., Use After Free, Improper Input Validation, OS Command Injection), demonstrating the practicality and significance of our VulRepair for generating vulnerability repairs, helping under-resourced security analysts on fixing vulnerabilities.