AI-powered patching: the future of automated vulnerability fixes
Abstract
As AI continues to advance at rapid speed, so has its ability to unearth hidden security vulnerabilities in all types of software. Every bug uncovered is an opportunity to patch and strengthen code—but as detection continues to improve, we need to be prepared with new automated solutions that bolster our ability to fix those bugs. That’s why our Secure AI Framework (SAIF) includes a fundamental pillar addressing the need to “automate defenses to keep pace with new and existing threats.”
This paper shares lessons from our experience leveraging AI to scale our ability to fix bugs, specifically those found by sanitizers in C/C++, Java, and Go code. By automating a pipeline to prompt Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code fixes for human review, we have harnessed our Gemini model to successfully fix 15% of sanitizer bugs discovered during unit tests, resulting in hundreds of bugs patched. Given the large number of sanitizer bugs found each year, this seemingly modest success rate will with time save significant engineering effort. We expect this success rate to continually improve and anticipate that LLMs can be used to fix bugs in various languages across the software development lifecycle.
This paper shares lessons from our experience leveraging AI to scale our ability to fix bugs, specifically those found by sanitizers in C/C++, Java, and Go code. By automating a pipeline to prompt Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code fixes for human review, we have harnessed our Gemini model to successfully fix 15% of sanitizer bugs discovered during unit tests, resulting in hundreds of bugs patched. Given the large number of sanitizer bugs found each year, this seemingly modest success rate will with time save significant engineering effort. We expect this success rate to continually improve and anticipate that LLMs can be used to fix bugs in various languages across the software development lifecycle.
Research Areas
