An Empirical Study of C++ Vulnerabilities in Crowd-Sourced Code Examples

Verdi, Morteza; Sami, Ashkan; Akhondali, Jafar; Khomh, Foutse; Uddin, Gias; Karami Motlagh, Alireza

Abstract

Software developers share programming solutions in Q&A sites like Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Android forum, and so on. The reuse of crowd-sourced code snippets can facilitate rapid prototyping. However, recent research shows that the shared code snippets may be of low quality and can even contain vulnerabilities. This paper aims to understand the nature and the prevalence of security vulnerabilities in crowd-sourced code examples. To achieve this goal, we investigate security vulnerabilities in the C++ code snippets shared on Stack Overflow over a period of 10 years. In collaborative sessions involving multiple human coders, we manually assessed each code snippet for security vulnerabilities following CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) guidelines. From the 72,483 reviewed code snippets used in at least one project hosted on GitHub, we found a total of 99 vulnerable code snippets categorized into 31 types. Many of the investigated code snippets are still not corrected on Stack Overflow. The 99 vulnerable code snippets found in Stack Overflow were reused in a total of 2859 GitHub projects. To help improve the quality of code snippets shared on Stack Overflow, we developed a browser extension that allows Stack Overflow users to be notified for vulnerabilities in code snippets when they see them on the platform.

Citation

Verdi, M., Sami, A., Akhondali, J., Khomh, F., Uddin, G., & Karami Motlagh, A. (2021, May). An Empirical Study of C++ Vulnerabilities in Crowd-Sourced Code Examples. Presented at 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering, Online

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering
• Start Date: May 23, 2021
• End Date: May 29, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Feb 10, 2021
• Online Publication Date: May 21, 2021
• Publication Date: May 25, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jul 15, 2024
• Print ISSN: 0098-5589
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1497-1514
• Series ISSN: 0098-5589
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3735050
• Publisher URL: https://2021.icse-conferences.org/details/icse-2021-Journal-First-Papers/36/An-Empirical-Study-of-C-Vulnerabilities-in-Crowd-Sourced-Code-Examples
• External URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01321v2