Triage for Hackers

Based upon our last experiment, in this article, I will provide a global vision of how our ML for vulnerability discovery approach should work.

First, what problem would this solve? I am repeating myself here but when one of our analysts has to audit a new continuous hacking project, usually all they get is access to one or more big code repositories. And what the client expects is a software vulnerability report as soon as possible. We would like our predictor to sort all the files in these repositories according to the likelihood, or possibility, that they contain a vulnerability so that the analyst can prioritize the manual inspection. Ideally, when the analyst is confronted with a new project, instead of looking at an overview of all files in a repository or its git log, they could have a number that ranks each file in the repo with the probability of it containing code vulnerabilities:

Next, how should this be done? Many different kinds of machine learning algorithms have been used by the authors we have reviewed here: random forests, deep neural networks, clustering, n-grams. The actual algorithm to be used is one of the variables that we can experiment with. For starters, we used a neural network with a single hidden layer for simplicity. Still, this gave us good results for a first iteration. Regardless of the algorithm to be chosen, all of these must be fed with samples of code labeled with their vulnerability, or in the simplest case, a "yes" for vulnerable and a "no" for the rest. Our algorithm will then proceed to "learn", whether it is pattern identification, anomaly detection or clustering, in the training phase, and be able to work in the prediction phase as described above.

But from the data analysis point of view, perhaps the most challenging aspect is: how do we feed code into an algorithm that expects numerical values or sets thereof, i.e., vectors from a continuum? We discussed this a bit in our presentation of the Python data ecosystem, and in our first iteration, we opted for breaking up the code string into tokens and further assigning an integer to each of these. We thus obtain a proper dataset for machine learning:

Other alternatives we will explore are word embeddings, such as word2vec and code2vec, which at the moment are not working for us as they project each token into a vector, while what we need is to map functions or even entire classes or files into a single vector. Token sequences are easily reversible, as seen in the last article, but code embeddings would not be so easy, thus dealing with the masking issue.

Thus far we have performed these experiments in local machines. However, this is impractical, for many reasons, one of which is the lack of computational muscle, in particular of GPUs, which are pretty much a requirement for deep neural networks. Amazon Web Services provides a solution called Sagemaker. In Sagemaker you are given a Jupyter notebook in which you can do data science to your heart’s content. No fuss about setting up machines, installing dependencies, everything is ready. Such would be our choice for training the machines. The output of this training process is a Python object which can make predictions. As seen in previous articles, this can be saved in the Keras H5 format and loaded again into a Python script. An easy way to deploy this model to make predictions would be on a serverless application on AWS Lambda, so that it could be readily accessed by the analysts to deal with new projects.

Hopefully, this cycle would be completed by the analyst manually detecting, confirming and exploiting —should there be a working environment— vulnerabilities where the classifier predicted high likelihood and reporting them back to Integrates. As the Integrates database fills up again, we should repeat the training cycle with a prudent frequency, which could be daily, weekly, etc. This is another hyperparameter to be tuned which would provide more data and feedback to the machine. That would complete the whole cycle:

We hope to be able to develop this tool in the next 6 to 8 months, or at the very least experiment with the possibilities ML provides to vulnerability discovery and continue reporting the results here. Stay tuned for more.