A Survey of Source Code Representations for Machine Learning-Based Cybersecurity Tasks

IF 23.8 1区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, THEORY & METHODS

ACM Computing Surveys Pub Date : 2025-03-05 DOI:10.1145/3721977

Beatrice Casey, Joanna C. S. Santos, George Perry

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Machine learning techniques for cybersecurity-related software engineering tasks are becoming increasingly popular. The representation of source code is a key portion of the technique that can impact the way the model is able to learn the features of the source code. With an increasing number of these techniques being developed, it is valuable to see the current state of the field to better understand what exists and what’s not there yet. This paper presents a study of these existing ML-based approaches and demonstrates what type of representations were used for different cybersecurity tasks and programming languages. Additionally, we study what types of models are used with different representations. We have found that graph-based representations are the most popular category of representation, and Tokenizers and Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) are the two most popular representations overall ( e.g. , AST and Tokenizers are the representations with the highest count of papers, while graph-based representations is the category with the highest count of papers). We also found that the most popular cybersecurity task is vulnerability detection, and the language that is covered by the most techniques is C. Finally, we found that sequence-based models are the most popular category of models, and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are the most popular model overall.

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来源期刊

ACM Computing Surveys 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

33.20

自引率

0.60%

发文量

372

审稿时长

12 months

期刊介绍： ACM Computing Surveys is an academic journal that focuses on publishing surveys and tutorials on various areas of computing research and practice. The journal aims to provide comprehensive and easily understandable articles that guide readers through the literature and help them understand topics outside their specialties. In terms of impact, CSUR has a high reputation with a 2022 Impact Factor of 16.6. It is ranked 3rd out of 111 journals in the field of Computer Science Theory & Methods. ACM Computing Surveys is indexed and abstracted in various services, including AI2 Semantic Scholar, Baidu, Clarivate/ISI: JCR, CNKI, DeepDyve, DTU, EBSCO: EDS/HOST, and IET Inspec, among others.