Vulnerability identification is crucial to protect the software systems from attacks for cyber security. It is especially important to localize the vulnerable functions among the source code to facilitate the fix. However, it is a challenging and tedious process, and also requires specialized security expertise. Inspired by the work on manually-defined patterns of vulnerabilities from various code representation graphs and the recent advance on graph neural networks, we propose Devign, a general graph neural network based model for graph-level classification through learning on a rich set of code semantic representations. It includes a novel Conv module to efficiently extract useful features in the learned rich node representations for graph-level classification. The model is trained over manually labeled datasets built on 4 diversified large-scale open-source C projects that incorporate high complexity and variety of real source code instead of synthesis code used in previous works. The results of the extensive evaluation on the datasets demonstrate that Devign outperforms the state of the arts significantly with an average of 10.51% higher accuracy and 8.68\% F1 score, increases averagely 4.66% accuracy and 6.37% F1 by the Conv module.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to a range of adversaries. A particularly pernicious class of vulnerabilities are backdoors, where model predictions diverge in the presence of subtle triggers in inputs. An attacker can implant a backdoor by poisoning the training data to yield a desired target prediction on triggered inputs. We study backdoors in the context of deep-learning for source code. (1) We define a range of backdoor classes for source-code tasks and show how to poison a dataset to install such backdoors. (2) We adapt and improve recent algorithms from robust statistics for our setting, showing that backdoors leave a spectral signature in the learned representation of source code, thus enabling detection of poisoned data. (3) We conduct a thorough evaluation on different architectures and languages, showing the ease of injecting backdoors and our ability to eliminate them.

It has been proved that deep neural networks are facing a new threat called backdoor attacks, where the adversary can inject backdoors into the neural network model through poisoning the training dataset. When the input containing some special pattern called the backdoor trigger, the model with backdoor will carry out malicious task such as misclassification specified by adversaries. In text classification systems, backdoors inserted in the models can cause spam or malicious speech to escape detection. Previous work mainly focused on the defense of backdoor attacks in computer vision, little attention has been paid to defense method for RNN backdoor attacks regarding text classification. In this paper, through analyzing the changes in inner LSTM neurons, we proposed a defense method called Backdoor Keyword Identification (BKI) to mitigate backdoor attacks which the adversary performs against LSTM-based text classification by data poisoning. This method can identify and exclude poisoning samples crafted to insert backdoor into the model from training data without a verified and trusted dataset. We evaluate our method on four different text classification datset: IMDB, DBpedia ontology, 20 newsgroups and Reuters-21578 dataset. It all achieves good performance regardless of the trigger sentences.

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent training-time threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). They can manipulate the output of DNNs and possess high insidiousness. In the field of natural language processing, some attack methods have been proposed and achieve very high attack success rates on multiple popular models. Nevertheless, there are few studies on defending against textual backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective textual backdoor defense named ONION, which is based on outlier word detection and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first method that can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in defending BiLSTM and BERT against five different backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/ONION.