arXiv subjects

Mona Rahimi

Publications and source records attributed to Mona Rahimi.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TraceVIC: Causal Reasoning over Code Evolution for Identifying Vulnerability-Inducing Commits

Software vulnerabilities are often discovered long after they are introduced, making it difficult to identify the vulnerability-inducing commit (VIC) responsible for introducing the underlying vulnerable condition. Existing VIC identification techniques largely rely on git blame to trace vulnerable code through revision history and use positional heuristics, such as selecting its earliest or most recent modification. However, the true VIC may occur anywhere within this history, and vulnerable behavior may depend on code that evolves across multiple revisions. We therefore argue that VIC identification requires reasoning about how vulnerability-relevant code evolves, rather than simply where a candidate commit appears in the revision history. We present TraceVIC, a temporal graph-based approach for identifying and ranking VICs by reasoning over code evolution. TraceVIC first localizes likely root-cause lines and traces their histories across revisions, constructing graph representations that capture program structure within each revision and the evolution of vulnerability-relevant code across the history. It reasons over the resulting revision history, using temporal edges to preserve correspondences between program elements across consecutive revisions, and directly ranks candidate commits according to their contribution to the vulnerable condition. Ablation results show that modeling the full revision history improves F2 from 0.637 to 0.814. TraceVIC improves F2 by up to 28.7% over state-of-the-art methods and identifies a valid VIC for 78 of 79 vulnerabilities across four unseen C/C++ projects.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

From Theory to Practice: Code Generation Using LLMs for CAPEC and CWE Frameworks

The increasing complexity and volume of software systems have heightened the importance of identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities. The existing software vulnerability datasets frequently fall short in providing comprehensive, detailed code snippets explicitly linked to specific vulnerability descriptions, reducing their utility for advanced research and hindering efforts to develop a deeper understanding of security vulnerabilities. To address this challenge, we present a novel dataset that provides examples of vulnerable code snippets corresponding to Common Attack Pattern Enumerations and Classifications (CAPEC) and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) descriptions. By employing the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models, we have developed a robust methodology for generating these examples. Our approach utilizes GPT-4o, Llama and Claude models to generate code snippets that exhibit specific vulnerabilities as described in CAPEC and CWE documentation. This dataset not only enhances the understanding of security vulnerabilities in code but also serves as a valuable resource for training machine learning models focused on automatic vulnerability detection and remediation. Preliminary evaluations suggest that the dataset generated by Large Language Models demonstrates high accuracy and can serve as a reliable reference for vulnerability identification systems. We found consistent results across the three models, with 0.98 cosine similarity among codes. The final dataset comprises 615 CAPEC code snippets in three programming languages: Java, Python, and JavaScript, making it one of the most extensive and diverse resources in this domain.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Process-based Indicators of Vulnerability Re-Introducing Code Changes: An Exploratory Case Study

Software vulnerabilities often persist or re-emerge even after being fixed, revealing the complex interplay between code evolution and socio-technical factors. While source code metrics provide useful indicators of vulnerabilities, software engineering process metrics can uncover patterns that lead to their introduction. Yet few studies have explored whether process metrics can reveal risky development activities over time -- insights that are essential for anticipating and mitigating software vulnerabilities. This work highlights the critical role of process metrics along with code changes in understanding and mitigating vulnerability reintroduction. We move beyond file-level prediction and instead analyze security fixes at the commit level, focusing not only on whether a single fix introduces a vulnerability but also on the longer sequences of changes through which vulnerabilities evolve and re-emerge. Our approach emphasizes that reintroduction is rarely the result of one isolated action, but emerges from cumulative development activities and socio-technical conditions. To support this analysis, we conducted a case study on the ImageMagick project by correlating longitudinal process metrics such as bus factor, issue density, and issue spoilage with vulnerability reintroduction activities, encompassing 76 instances of reintroduced vulnerabilities. Our findings show that reintroductions often align with increased issue spoilage and fluctuating issue density, reflecting short-term inefficiencies in issue management and team responsiveness. These observations provide a foundation for broader studies that combine process and code metrics to predict risky fixes and strengthen software security.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

AI-Based Software Vulnerability Detection: A Systematic Literature Review

Software vulnerabilities in source code pose serious cybersecurity risks, prompting a shift from traditional detection methods (e.g., static analysis, rule-based matching) to AI-driven approaches. This study presents a systematic review of software vulnerability detection (SVD) research from 2018 to 2023, offering a comprehensive taxonomy of techniques, feature representations, and embedding methods. Our analysis reveals that 91% of studies use AI-based methods, with graph-based models being the most prevalent. We identify key limitations, including dataset quality, reproducibility, and interpretability, and highlight emerging opportunities in underexplored techniques such as federated learning and quantum neural networks, providing a roadmap for future research.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Test Case Recommendations with Distributed Representation of Code Syntactic Features

Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly, automating the process of generation and maintenance of test units will significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing processes. To this end, we propose an automated approach which exploits both structural and semantic properties of source code methods and test cases to recommend the most relevant and useful unit tests to the developers. The proposed approach initially trains a neural network to transform method-level source code, as well as unit tests, into distributed representations (embedded vectors) while preserving the importance of the structure in the code. Retrieving the semantic and structural properties of a given method, the approach computes cosine similarity between the method's embedding and the previously-embedded training instances. Further, according to the similarity scores between the embedding vectors, the model identifies the closest methods of embedding and the associated unit tests as the most similar recommendations. The results on the Methods2Test dataset showed that, while there is no guarantee to have similar relevant test cases for the group of similar methods, the proposed approach extracts the most similar existing test cases for a given method in the dataset, and evaluations show that recommended test cases decrease the developers' effort to generating expected test cases.

cs.LG↗