Evaluating and Comparing Complexity, Coupling and a New Proposed Set of Coupling Metrics in Cross-project Vulnerability Prediction

Software security is an important concern in the world moving towards Information Technology. Detecting software vulnerabilities is a difficult and resource consuming task. Therefore, automatic vulnerability prediction would help development teams to predict vulnerability-prone components and prioritize security inspection efforts. Software source code metrics and data mining techniques have been recently used to predict vulnerability-prone components. Some of previous studies used a set of unit complexity and coupling metrics to predict vulnerabilities. In this study, first, we compare the predictability power of these two groups of metrics in cross-project vulnerability prediction. In cross-project vulnerability prediction we create the prediction model based on datasets of completely different projects and try to detect vulnerabilities in another project. The experimental results show that unit complexity metrics are stronger vulnerability predictors than coupling metrics. Then, we propose a new set of coupling metrics which are called Included Vulnerable Header (IVH) metrics. These new coupling metrics, which consider interaction of application modules with outside of the application, predict vulnerabilities highly better than regular coupling metrics. Furthermore, adding IVH metrics to the set of complexity metrics improves Recall of the best predictor from 60.9% to 87.4% and shows the best set of metrics for cross-project vulnerability prediction.