Deep Cost-Sensitive Kernel Machine for Binary Software Vulnerability Detection

Nguyen, Tuan; Le, Trung; Nguyen, Khanh; Vel, Olivier de; Montague, Paul; Grundy, John; Phung, Dinh

Owing to the sharp rise in the severity of the threats imposed by software vulnerabilities, software vulnerability detection has become an important concern in the software industry, such as the embedded systems industry, and in the field of computer security. Software vulnerability detection can be carried out at the source code or binary level. However, the latter is more impactful and practical since when using commercial software, we usually only possess binary software. In this paper, we leverage deep learning and kernel methods to propose the Deep Cost-sensitive Kernel Machine, a method that inherits the advantages of deep learning methods in efficiently tackling structural data and kernel methods in learning the characteristic of vulnerable binary examples with high generalization capacity. We conduct experiments on two real-world binary datasets. The experimental results have shown a convincing outperformance of our proposed method over the baselines.