Cross-Cutting Security Analysis of LLM-Generated Code via Metamorphic Testing and Association Rule Mining

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate code with security vulnerabilities, yet these weaknesses are rarely isolated: they often span multiple concern areas simultaneously, reflecting the cross-cutting nature of security in software. We present a framework that combines security-oriented Metamorphic Relations (MRs) with Association Rule (AR) mining to detect vulnerabilities in LLM-generated code, uncover their co-violation structure, and trace that structure back to prompt-level risk factors. We define nine MRs covering major CWE categories, including SQL injection, XSS, command injection, path traversal, hard-coded credentials, weak cryptography, and memory-safety errors, and apply them using an LLM-based judge to 3,700 code snippets generated by five open models from the LLMSecEval benchmark. The results show that 68.8% of snippets violate at least one MR, with hard-coded credentials (79.1%) and command injection (74.4%) among the most prevalent applicable failures. AR mining reveals strong cross-cutting co-violation patterns, notably that XSS and weak cryptography co-violations predict hard-coded credentials with 82.5% confidence (lift = 3.23), along with tightly coupled clusters linking authentication, credential handling, and cryptographic weakness, as well as input-handling and memory-safety failures. We then perform prompt-level risk analysis and find that database- and authentication-related prompts are strong predictors of broad cross-cutting insecurity, while 65.5% of prompts yield consistent violation outcomes across all five models. These findings show that insecure code generation is not merely a collection of independent defects, but a structured and prompt-conditioned phenomenon, motivating cluster-aware verification and prompt-level intervention for safer LLM-assisted programming.