Deep Domain Adaptation With Max-Margin Principle for Cross-Project Imbalanced Software Vulnerability Detection

Software vulnerabilities (SVs) have become a common, serious, and crucial concern due to the ubiquity of computer software. Many AI-based approaches have been proposed to solve the software vulnerability detection (SVD) problem to ensure the security and integrity of software applications (in both the development and testing phases). However, there are still two open and significant issues for SVD in terms of i) learning automatic representations to improve the predictive performance of SVD, and ii) tackling the scarcity of labeled vulnerability datasets that conventionally need laborious labeling effort by experts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle these two crucial issues. We first exploit the automatic representation learning with deep domain adaptation for SVD. We then propose a novel cross-domain kernel classifier leveraging the max-margin principle to significantly improve the transfer learning process of SVs from imbalanced labeled into imbalanced unlabeled projects. Our approach is the first work that leverages solid body theories of the max-margin principle, kernel methods, and bridging the gap between source and target domains for imbalanced domain adaptation (DA) applied in cross-project SVD. The experimental results on real-world software datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines. In short, our method obtains a higher performance on F1-measure, one of the most important measures in SVD, from 1.83% to 6.25% compared to the second highest method in the used datasets.