Vulnerability Detection in Popular Programming Languages with Language Models

Abstract: Vulnerability detection is crucial for maintaining software security, and recent research has explored the use of LLMs (LMs) for this task. While LMs have shown promising results, their performance has been inconsistent across datasets, particularly when generalizing to unseen code. Moreover, most studies have focused on the C/C++ programming language, with limited attention given to other popular languages. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the effectiveness of LMs for vulnerability detection in JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, and Go, in addition to C/C++ for comparison. We utilize the CVEFixes dataset to create a diverse collection of language-specific vulnerabilities and preprocess the data to ensure quality and integrity. We fine-tune and evaluate state-of-the-art LMs across the selected languages and find that the performance of vulnerability detection varies significantly. JavaScript exhibits the best performance, with considerably better and more practical detection capabilities compared to C/C++. We also examine the relationship between code complexity and detection performance across the six languages and find only a weak correlation between code complexity metrics and the models' F1 scores.