arXiv subjects

M. Ali Babar

Publications and source records attributed to M. Ali Babar.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Experimental Analysis of Productive Interaction Strategy with ChatGPT: User Study on Function and Project-level Code Generation Tasks

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is growing in the productive completion of Software Engineering tasks. Yet, studies investigating productive prompting techniques often employed a limited problem space, focusing primarily on well-known prompting patterns and targeting function-level SE practices. We identify significant gaps in real-world workflows that involve complexities beyond class-level (e.g., multi-class dependencies) and different features that can impact Human-LLM Interaction (HLI) processes in code generation. To address these issues, we designed an experiment to comprehensively analyze HLI features related to code generation productivity. Our study presents two project-level benchmark tasks that extend beyond function-level evaluations. We conducted a user study with 36 participants from diverse backgrounds, asking them to solve the assigned tasks by interacting with the GPT assistant using specific prompting patterns. We also examined participants' experiences and behavioral features during interactions by analyzing screen recordings and GPT chat logs. Our empirical investigation, based on statistical guidance, revealed (1) that three out of 15 HLI features emerged as consistently supported factors for productivity; (2) five primary guidelines for enhancing productivity for HLI processes; and (3) a taxonomy of 29 runtime and logic errors that can occur during HLI processes, along with suggested mitigation plans.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Understanding the Impact of AI Code Assistants on Security API Usage: An Empirical Study

AI code assistants are transforming software development, but their implications for software security remain a major concern, particularly in the context of security APIs. These APIs are critical for safeguarding software systems, yet their complexity often leads to incorrect use and serious vulnerabilities. Developing an evidence-based understanding of how AI assistants influence developers' use of these APIs is therefore essential for informing effective mitigation strategies. While a few user studies have examined the broader impact of AI assistants on software vulnerabilities, the use of security APIs remains unexplored from a developer-centered perspective. This study addresses this gap by presenting the first empirical investigation into how AI code assistants affect professional developers' use of security APIs. We conducted a study with 44 developers who completed security API programming tasks with and without GitHub Copilot assistance. Our findings show that, while Copilot improves functional correctness and marginally reduces certain insecure patterns, it does not significantly improve secure API usage. We also found that developers rarely raised security concerns when engaging with Copilot, and many did not recognize that their final implementations remained insecure. Finally, we offer recommendations for enhancing security awareness among developers and propose future research directions to support safer AI-assisted software development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

ORACAL: A Robust and Explainable Multimodal Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Causal Graph Enrichment

Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise for smart contract vulnerability detection, they still face significant limitations. Homogeneous graph models fail to capture the interplay between control flow and data dependencies, while heterogeneous graph approaches often lack deep semantic understanding, leaving them susceptible to adversarial attacks. Moreover, most black-box models fail to provide explainable evidence, hindering trust in professional audits. To address these challenges, we propose ORACAL (Observable RAG-enhanced Analysis with CausAL reasoning), a heterogeneous multimodal graph learning framework that integrates Control Flow Graph (CFG), Data Flow Graph (DFG), and Call Graph (CG). ORACAL selectively enriches critical subgraphs with expert-level security context from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs), and employs a causal attention mechanism to disentangle true vulnerability indicators from spurious correlations. For transparency, the framework adopts PGExplainer to generate subgraph-level explanations identifying vulnerability triggering paths. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate that ORACAL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming MANDO-HGT, MTVHunter, GNN-SC, and SCVHunter by up to 39.6 percentage points, with a peak Macro F1 of 91.28% on the primary benchmark. ORACAL maintains strong generalization on out-of-distribution datasets with 91.8% on CGT Weakness and 77.1% on DAppScan. In explainability evaluation, PGExplainer achieves 32.51% Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU) against manually annotated vulnerability triggering paths. Under adversarial attacks, ORACAL limits performance degradation to approximately 2.35% F1 decrease with an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of only 3%, surpassing SCVHunter and MANDO-HGT which exhibit ASRs ranging from 10.91% to 18.73%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Securing the AI Supply Chain: What Can We Learn From Developer-Reported Security Issues and Solutions of AI Projects?

The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and applications has led to an increasingly complex security landscape. Developers of AI projects must contend not only with traditional software supply chain issues but also with novel, AI-specific security threats. However, little is known about what security issues are commonly encountered and how they are resolved in practice. This gap hinders the development of effective security measures for each component of the AI supply chain. We bridge this gap by conducting an empirical investigation of developer-reported issues and solutions, based on discussions from Hugging Face and GitHub. To identify security-related discussions, we develop a pipeline that combines keyword matching with an optimal fine-tuned distilBERT classifier, which achieved the best performance in our extensive comparison of various deep learning and large language models. This pipeline produces a dataset of 312,868 security discussions, providing insights into the security reporting practices of AI applications and projects. We conduct a thematic analysis of 753 posts sampled from our dataset and uncover a fine-grained taxonomy of 32 security issues and 24 solutions across four themes: (1) System and Software, (2) External Tools and Ecosystem, (3) Model, and (4) Data. We reveal that many security issues arise from the complex dependencies and black-box nature of AI components. Notably, challenges related to Models and Data often lack concrete solutions. Our insights can offer evidence-based guidance for developers and researchers to address real-world security threats across the AI supply chain.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Software Vulnerability Management in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: An Industry Perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized software development, particularly by automating repetitive tasks and improving developer productivity. While these advancements are well-documented, the use of AI-powered tools for Software Vulnerability Management (SVM), such as vulnerability detection and repair, remains underexplored in industry settings. To bridge this gap, our study aims to determine the extent of the adoption of AI-powered tools for SVM, identify barriers and facilitators to the use, and gather insights to help improve the tools to meet industry needs better. We conducted a survey study involving 60 practitioners from diverse industry sectors across 27 countries. The survey incorporates both quantitative and qualitative questions to analyze the adoption trends, assess tool strengths, identify practical challenges, and uncover opportunities for improvement. Our findings indicate that AI-powered tools are used throughout the SVM life cycle, with 69% of users reporting satisfaction with their current use. Practitioners value these tools for their speed, coverage, and accessibility. However, concerns about false positives, missing context, and trust issues remain prevalent. We observe a socio-technical adoption pattern in which AI outputs are filtered through human oversight and organizational governance. To support safe and effective use of AI for SVM, we recommend improvements in explainability, contextual awareness, integration workflows, and validation practices. We assert that these findings can offer practical guidance for practitioners, tool developers, and researchers seeking to enhance secure software development through the use of AI.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Alert-ME: An Explainability-Driven Defense Against Adversarial Examples in Transformer-Based Text Classification

Transformer-based text classifiers such as BERT, RoBERTa, T5, and GPT have shown strong performance in natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to adversarial examples. These vulnerabilities raise significant security concerns, as small input perturbations can cause severe misclassifications. Existing robustness methods often require heavy computation or lack interpretability. This paper presents a unified framework called Explainability-driven Detection, Identification, and Transformation (EDIT) to strengthen inference-time defenses. EDIT integrates explainability tools, including attention maps and integrated gradients, with frequency-based features to automatically detect and identify adversarial perturbations while offering insight into model behavior. After detection, EDIT refines adversarial inputs using an optimal transformation process that leverages pre-trained embeddings and model feedback to replace corrupted tokens. To enhance security assurance, EDIT incorporates automated alerting mechanisms that involve human analysts when necessary. Beyond static defenses, EDIT also provides adaptive resilience by enforcing internal feature similarity and transforming inputs, thereby disrupting the attackers optimization process and limiting the effectiveness of adaptive adversarial attacks. Experiments using BERT and RoBERTa on IMDB, YELP, AGNEWS, and SST2 datasets against seven word substitution attacks demonstrate that EDIT achieves an average Fscore of 89.69 percent and balanced accuracy of 89.70 percent. Compared to four state-of-the-art defenses, EDIT improves balanced accuracy by 1.22 times and F1-score by 1.33 times while being 83 times faster in feature extraction. The framework provides robust, interpretable, and efficient protection against both standard, zero-day, and adaptive adversarial threats in text classification models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Inclusive Employment Pathways: Career Success Factors for Autistic Individuals in Software Engineering

Research has highlighted the valuable contributions of autistic individuals in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, particularly in areas such as software development, testing, and cybersecurity. Their strengths in information processing, attention to detail, innovative thinking, and commitment to high-quality outcomes in the ICT domain are well-documented. However, despite their potential, autistic individuals often face barriers in Software Engineering (SE) roles due to a lack of personalised tools, complex work environments, non-inclusive recruitment practices, limited co-worker support, challenging social dynamics and so on. Motivated by the ethical framework of the neurodiversity movement and the success of pioneering initiatives like the Dandelion program, corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the ICT sector has increasingly focused on autistic talent. This movement fundamentally reframes challenges not as individual deficits but as failures of environments designed for a neurotypical majority. Despite this progress, there is no synthesis of knowledge reporting the full pathway from software engineering education through to sustainable workplace inclusion. To address this, we conducted a Systematic Review of 30 studies and identified 18 success factors grouped into four thematic categories: (1) Software Engineering Education, (2) Career and Employment Training, (3) Work Environment, and (4) Tools and Assistive Technologies. Our findings offer evidence-based recommendations for educational institutions, employers, organisations, and tool developers to enhance the inclusion of autistic individuals in SE. These include strategies for inclusive meeting and collaboration practices, accessible and structured work environments, clear role and responsibility definitions, and the provision of tailored workplace accommodations.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Toward Realistic Evaluations of Just-In-Time Vulnerability Prediction

Modern software systems are increasingly complex, presenting significant challenges in quality assurance. Just-in-time vulnerability prediction (JIT-VP) is a proactive approach to identifying vulnerable commits and providing early warnings about potential security risks. However, we observe that current JIT-VP evaluations rely on an idealized setting, where the evaluation datasets are artificially balanced, consisting exclusively of vulnerability-introducing and vulnerability-fixing commits. To address this limitation, this study assesses the effectiveness of JIT-VP techniques under a more realistic setting that includes both vulnerability-related and vulnerability-neutral commits. To enable a reliable evaluation, we introduce a large-scale public dataset comprising over one million commits from FFmpeg and the Linux kernel. Our empirical analysis of eight state-of-the-art JIT-VP techniques reveals a significant decline in predictive performance when applied to real-world conditions; for example, the average PR-AUC on Linux drops 98% from 0.805 to 0.016. This discrepancy is mainly attributed to the severe class imbalance in real-world datasets, where vulnerability-introducing commits constitute only a small fraction of all commits. To mitigate this issue, we explore the effectiveness of widely adopted techniques for handling dataset imbalance, including customized loss functions, oversampling, and undersampling. Surprisingly, our experimental results indicate that these techniques are ineffective in addressing the imbalance problem in JIT-VP. These findings underscore the importance of realistic evaluations of JIT-VP and the need for domain-specific techniques to address data imbalance in such scenarios.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

VulGuard: An Unified Tool for Evaluating Just-In-Time Vulnerability Prediction Models

We present VulGuard, an automated tool designed to streamline the extraction, processing, and analysis of commits from GitHub repositories for Just-In-Time vulnerability prediction (JIT-VP) research. VulGuard automatically mines commit histories, extracts fine-grained code changes, commit messages, and software engineering metrics, and formats them for downstream analysis. In addition, it integrates several state-of-the-art vulnerability prediction models, allowing researchers to train, evaluate, and compare models with minimal setup. By supporting both repository-scale mining and model-level experimentation within a unified framework, VulGuard addresses key challenges in reproducibility and scalability in software security research. VulGuard can also be easily integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool in two influential open-source projects, FFmpeg and the Linux kernel, highlighting its potential to accelerate real-world JIT-VP research and promote standardized benchmarking. A demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/j96096-pxbs

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Search-based Selection of Metamorphic Relations for Optimized Robustness Testing of Large Language Models

Assessing the trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as robustness, has garnered significant attention. Recently, metamorphic testing that defines Metamorphic Relations (MRs) has been widely applied to evaluate the robustness of LLM executions. However, the MR-based robustness testing still requires a scalable number of MRs, thereby necessitating the optimization of selecting MRs. Most extant LLM testing studies are limited to automatically generating test cases (i.e., MRs) to enhance failure detection. Additionally, most studies only considered a limited test space of single perturbation MRs in their evaluation of LLMs. In contrast, our paper proposes a search-based approach for optimizing the MR groups to maximize failure detection and minimize the LLM execution cost. Moreover, our approach covers the combinatorial perturbations in MRs, facilitating the expansion of test space in the robustness assessment. We have developed a search process and implemented four search algorithms: Single-GA, NSGA-II, SPEA2, and MOEA/D with novel encoding to solve the MR selection problem in the LLM robustness testing. We conducted comparative experiments on the four search algorithms along with a random search, using two major LLMs with primary Text-to-Text tasks. Our statistical and empirical investigation revealed two key findings: (1) the MOEA/D algorithm performed the best in optimizing the MR space for LLM robustness testing, and (2) we identified silver bullet MRs for the LLM robustness testing, which demonstrated dominant capabilities in confusing LLMs across different Text-to-Text tasks. In LLM robustness assessment, our research sheds light on the fundamental problem for optimized testing and provides insights into search-based solutions.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Detecting Misuse of Security APIs: A Systematic Review

Security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are crucial for ensuring software security. However, their misuse introduces vulnerabilities, potentially leading to severe data breaches and substantial financial loss. Complex API design, inadequate documentation, and insufficient security training often lead to unintentional misuse by developers. The software security community has devised and evaluated several approaches to detecting security API misuse to help developers and organizations. This study rigorously reviews the literature on detecting misuse of security APIs to gain a comprehensive understanding of this critical domain. Our goal is to identify and analyze security API misuses, the detection approaches developed, and the evaluation methodologies employed along with the open research avenues to advance the state-of-the-art in this area. Employing the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology, we analyzed 69 research papers. Our review has yielded (a) identification of 6 security API types; (b) classification of 30 distinct misuses; (c) categorization of detection techniques into heuristic-based and ML-based approaches; and (d) identification of 10 performance measures and 9 evaluation benchmarks. The review reveals a lack of coverage of detection approaches in several areas. We recommend that future efforts focus on aligning security API development with developers' needs and advancing standardized evaluation methods for detection technologies.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

DDPT: Diffusion-Driven Prompt Tuning for Large Language Model Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation. However, the quality of the generated code is heavily dependent on the structure and composition of the prompts used. Crafting high-quality prompts is a challenging task that requires significant knowledge and skills of prompt engineering. To advance the automation support for the prompt engineering for LLM-based code generation, we propose a novel solution Diffusion-Driven Prompt Tuning (DDPT) that learns how to generate optimal prompt embedding from Gaussian Noise to automate the prompt engineering for code generation. We evaluate the feasibility of diffusion-based optimization and abstract the optimal prompt embedding as a directional vector toward the optimal embedding. We use the code generation loss given by the LLMs to help the diffusion model capture the distribution of optimal prompt embedding during training. The trained diffusion model can build a path from the noise distribution to the optimal distribution at the sampling phrase, the evaluation result demonstrates that DDPT helps improve the prompt optimization for code generation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

LLMSecConfig: An LLM-Based Approach for Fixing Software Container Misconfigurations

Security misconfigurations in Container Orchestrators (COs) can pose serious threats to software systems. While Static Analysis Tools (SATs) can effectively detect these security vulnerabilities, the industry currently lacks automated solutions capable of fixing these misconfigurations. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), with their proven capabilities in code understanding and generation, presents an opportunity to address this limitation. This study introduces LLMSecConfig, an innovative framework that bridges this gap by combining SATs with LLMs. Our approach leverages advanced prompting techniques and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to automatically repair security misconfigurations while preserving operational functionality. Evaluation of 1,000 real-world Kubernetes configurations achieved a 94\% success rate while maintaining a low rate of introducing new misconfigurations. Our work makes a promising step towards automated container security management, reducing the manual effort required for configuration maintenance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

MVD: A Multi-Lingual Software Vulnerability Detection Framework

Software vulnerabilities can result in catastrophic cyberattacks that increasingly threaten business operations. Consequently, ensuring the safety of software systems has become a paramount concern for both private and public sectors. Recent literature has witnessed increasing exploration of learning-based approaches for software vulnerability detection. However, a key limitation of these techniques is their primary focus on a single programming language, such as C/C++, which poses constraints considering the polyglot nature of modern software projects. Further, there appears to be an oversight in harnessing the synergies of vulnerability knowledge across varied languages, potentially underutilizing the full capabilities of these methods. To address the aforementioned issues, we introduce MVD - an innovative multi-lingual vulnerability detection framework. This framework acquires the ability to detect vulnerabilities across multiple languages by concurrently learning from vulnerability data of various languages, which are curated by our specialized pipeline. We also incorporate incremental learning to enable the detection capability of MVD to be extended to new languages, thus augmenting its practical utility. Extensive experiments on our curated dataset of more than 11K real-world multi-lingual vulnerabilities substantiate that our framework significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in multi-lingual vulnerability detection by 83.7% to 193.6% in PR-AUC. The results also demonstrate that MVD detects vulnerabilities well for new languages without compromising the detection performance of previously trained languages, even when training data for the older languages is unavailable. Overall, our findings motivate and pave the way for the prediction of multi-lingual vulnerabilities in modern software systems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Automated Code-centric Software Vulnerability Assessment: How Far Are We? An Empirical Study in C/C++

Background: The C and C++ languages hold significant importance in Software Engineering research because of their widespread use in practice. Numerous studies have utilized Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques to detect software vulnerabilities (SVs) in the source code written in these languages. However, the application of these techniques in function-level SV assessment has been largely unexplored. SV assessment is increasingly crucial as it provides detailed information on the exploitability, impacts, and severity of security defects, thereby aiding in their prioritization and remediation. Aims: We conduct the first empirical study to investigate and compare the performance of ML and DL models, many of which have been used for SV detection, for function-level SV assessment in C/C++. Method: Using 9,993 vulnerable C/C++ functions, we evaluated the performance of six multi-class ML models and five multi-class DL models for the SV assessment at the function level based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). We further explore multi-task learning, which can leverage common vulnerable code to predict all SV assessment outputs simultaneously in a single model, and compare the effectiveness and efficiency of this model type with those of the original multi-class models. Results: We show that ML has matching or even better performance compared to the multi-class DL models for function-level SV assessment with significantly less training time. Employing multi-task learning allows the DL models to perform significantly better, with an average of 8-22% increase in Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). Conclusions: We distill the practices of using data-driven techniques for function-level SV assessment in C/C++, including the use of multi-task DL to balance efficiency and effectiveness. This can establish a strong foundation for future work in this area.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

A Qualitative Study on Using ChatGPT for Software Security: Perception vs. Practicality

Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements have enabled the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) that can perform a variety of tasks with remarkable semantic understanding and accuracy. ChatGPT is one such LLM that has gained significant attention due to its impressive capabilities for assisting in various knowledge-intensive tasks. Due to the knowledge-intensive nature of engineering secure software, ChatGPT's assistance is expected to be explored for security-related tasks during the development/evolution of software. To gain an understanding of the potential of ChatGPT as an emerging technology for supporting software security, we adopted a two-fold approach. Initially, we performed an empirical study to analyse the perceptions of those who had explored the use of ChatGPT for security tasks and shared their views on Twitter. It was determined that security practitioners view ChatGPT as beneficial for various software security tasks, including vulnerability detection, information retrieval, and penetration testing. Secondly, we designed an experiment aimed at investigating the practicality of this technology when deployed as an oracle in real-world settings. In particular, we focused on vulnerability detection and qualitatively examined ChatGPT outputs for given prompts within this prominent software security task. Based on our analysis, responses from ChatGPT in this task are largely filled with generic security information and may not be appropriate for industry use. To prevent data leakage, we performed this analysis on a vulnerability dataset compiled after the OpenAI data cut-off date from real-world projects covering 40 distinct vulnerability types and 12 programming languages. We assert that the findings from this study would contribute to future research aimed at developing and evaluating LLMs dedicated to software security.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Automatic Data Labeling for Software Vulnerability Prediction Models: How Far Are We?

Background: Software Vulnerability (SV) prediction needs large-sized and high-quality data to perform well. Current SV datasets mostly require expensive labeling efforts by experts (human-labeled) and thus are limited in size. Meanwhile, there are growing efforts in automatic SV labeling at scale. However, the fitness of auto-labeled data for SV prediction is still largely unknown. Aims: We quantitatively and qualitatively study the quality and use of the state-of-the-art auto-labeled SV data, D2A, for SV prediction. Method: Using multiple sources and manual validation, we curate clean SV data from human-labeled SV-fixing commits in two well-known projects for investigating the auto-labeled counterparts. Results: We discover that 50+% of the auto-labeled SVs are noisy (incorrectly labeled), and they hardly overlap with the publicly reported ones. Yet, SV prediction models utilizing the noisy auto-labeled SVs can perform up to 22% and 90% better in Matthews Correlation Coefficient and Recall, respectively, than the original models. We also reveal the promises and difficulties of applying noise-reduction methods for automatically addressing the noise in auto-labeled SV data to maximize the data utilization for SV prediction. Conclusions: Our study informs the benefits and challenges of using auto-labeled SVs, paving the way for large-scale SV prediction.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Mitigating Data Imbalance for Software Vulnerability Assessment: Does Data Augmentation Help?

Background: Software Vulnerability (SV) assessment is increasingly adopted to address the ever-increasing volume and complexity of SVs. Data-driven approaches have been widely used to automate SV assessment tasks, particularly the prediction of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) metrics such as exploitability, impact, and severity. SV assessment suffers from the imbalanced distributions of the CVSS classes, but such data imbalance has been hardly understood and addressed in the literature. Aims: We conduct a large-scale study to quantify the impacts of data imbalance and mitigate the issue for SV assessment through the use of data augmentation. Method: We leverage nine data augmentation techniques to balance the class distributions of the CVSS metrics. We then compare the performance of SV assessment models with and without leveraging the augmented data. Results: Through extensive experiments on 180k+ real-world SVs, we show that mitigating data imbalance can significantly improve the predictive performance of models for all the CVSS tasks, by up to 31.8% in Matthews Correlation Coefficient. We also discover that simple text augmentation like combining random text insertion, deletion, and replacement can outperform the baseline across the board. Conclusions: Our study provides the motivation and the first promising step toward tackling data imbalance for effective SV assessment.

cs.SE↗