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Abstract
Static analysis is a powerful tool for detecting security vulnerabilities and
other programming problems. Global taint tracking, in particular, can spot
vulnerabilities arising from complicated data flow across multiple functions.
However, precisely identifying which flows are problematic is challenging, and
sometimes depends on factors beyond the reach of pure program analysis, such as
conventions and informal knowledge. For example, learning that a parameter
"name" of an API function "locale" ends up in a file path is surprising and
potentially problematic. In contrast, it would be completely unsurprising to
find that a parameter "command" passed to an API function "execaCommand" is
eventually interpreted as part of an operating-system command. This paper
presents Fluffy, a bimodal taint analysis that combines static analysis, which
reasons about data flow, with machine learning, which probabilistically
determines which flows are potentially problematic. The key idea is to let
machine learning models predict from natural language information involved in a
taint flow, such as API names, whether the flow is expected or unexpected, and
to inform developers only about the latter. We present a general framework and
instantiate it with four learned models, which offer different trade-offs
between the need to annotate training data and the accuracy of predictions. We
implement Fluffy on top of the CodeQL analysis framework and apply it to 250K
JavaScript projects. Evaluating on five common vulnerability types, we find
that Fluffy achieves an F1 score of 0.85 or more on four of them across a
variety of datasets.