Survey of Source Code Bug Detection Based on Deep Learning

Source code bug (vulnerability) detection is a process of judging whether there are unexpected behaviors in the program code. It is widely used in software engineering tasks such as software testing and software maintenance, and plays a vital role in software functional assurance and application security. Traditional vulnerability detection research is based on program analysis, which usually requires strong domain knowledge and complex calculation rules, and faces the problem of state explosion, resulting in limited detection performance, and there is room for greater improvement in the rate of false positives and false negatives. In recent years, the open source community’s vigorous development has accumulated massive amounts of data with open source code as the core. In this context, the feature learning capabilities of deep learning can automatically learn semantically rich code representations, thereby providing a new way for vulnerability detection. This study collected the latest high-level papers in this field, systematically summarized and explained the current methods from two aspects: vulnerability code dataset and deep learning vulnerability detection model. Finally, it summarizes the main challenges faced by the research in this field, and looks forward to the possible future research focus. © 2023 Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.