7.3SEMay 18
Mapping NVD Records to Their Vulnerability-fixing Commits: How Hard is It?Huu Hung Nguyen, Ting Zhang, Duc Manh Tran et al.
Mapping National Vulnerability Database (NVD) records to vulnerability-fixing commits (VFCs) is crucial for vulnerability analysis but challenging due to sparse explicit links in NVD references. This study explores this mapping's feasibility through an empirical approach. Manual analysis of NVD references showed Git references enable over 86% success, while non-Git references achieve under 14%. Using these findings, we built an automated pipeline extracting 31,942 VFCs from 20,360 NVD records (8.7% of 235,341) with 87% precision, mainly from Git references. To fill gaps, we mined six external security databases, yielding 29,254 VFCs for 18,985 records (8.1%) at 88.4% precision, and GitHub repositories, adding 3,686 VFCs for 2,795 records (1.2%) at 73% precision. Combining these, we mapped 26,710 unique records (11.3% coverage) from 7,634 projects, with overlap between NVD and external databases, plus unique GitHub contributions. Despite success with Git references, 88.7% of records remain unmapped, highlighting the difficulty without Git links. This study offers insights for enhancing vulnerability datasets and guiding future automated security research.
10.2CRJul 24
PoCEvolve: Generating Proof-of-Concept Exploits from Security Patches with Vulnerability-Aware Prompt EvolutionDuc Manh Tran, Ratnadira Widyasari, Ivana Clairine Irsan et al.
Ideally, the detailed information about a vulnerability should be made available together with the fixing commit. In practice, however, such details often become available only long after the commit, even when a CVE has already been published. During this window, the patch is already public, so attackers can reverse-engineer it, yet defenders lack the details needed to assess exposure, prioritize, and validate the fix. Executable evidence, such as a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, could fill this gap. Prior work has automated PoC generation, but the state-of-the-art approach, PoCGen, assumes that a detailed vulnerability report is already available, which is precisely what is missing during this window. In this paper, we first present an empirical study quantifying the long delay between the fixing commit and the availability of a detailed vulnerability report. We then introduce PoCEvolve, a vulnerability-aware prompt-evolution framework that generates PoCs directly from vulnerability-fixing commits. Given a vulnerability-fixing commit, PoCEvolve synthesizes a corresponding PoC exploit. To learn from unsuccessful generation attempts, PoCEvolve assesses the usefulness of different dimensions of vulnerability-related context, including the inferred vulnerable API and code-coverage information. These assessments guide prompt evolution towards more effective exploit-generation prompts. We evaluate PoCEvolve on SecBench.VFC.js, where PoCEvolve achieves a PoC generation success rate of 58.4%, corresponding to relative improvements of 20.7% over PoCGen and 200.0% over the LLM baseline with GPT-4o-mini. With a recent model, Qwen3.7-Plus, PoCEvolve achieves a higher success rate of 85.3%. When detailed vulnerability reports are available, PoCEvolve achieves a success rate of 71.7%, improving over PoCGen by 11.1%.