Software security vulnerabilities are discovered on an almost daily basis and have caused substantial damage. It is vital to be able to detect and resolve them as early as possible. One of early detection approaches is to consult with the prior known vulnerabilities and corresponding patches. With the hypothesis that recurring software vulnerabilities are due to software reuse, we conducted an empirical study on several databases for security vulnerabilities and found several recurring and similar software security vulnerabilities occurring in different software systems. Most of recurring vulnerabilities occur in the systems that reuse source code, share libraries/APIs or reuse at a higher level of abstraction (e.g. algorithms, protocols, or specifications).

The finding suggests that one could effectively detect and resolve some unreported vulnerabilities in one software system by consulting the prior known and reported vulnerabilities in the other systems that reuse/share source code, libraries/APIs, or specifications. To help developers with this task, we developed SecureSync, a supporting tool to automatically detect recurring software vulnerabilities in different systems that share source code or libraries, which are the most frequent types of recurring vulnerabilities. SecureSync is designed to work with a semi-automatically built knowledge base of the prior known/reported vulnerabilities, including the corresponding systems, libraries, and vulnerable and patched code. To help developers check and fix the vulnerable code, SecureSync also provides some suggestions such as adding missed function calls, adding checking of an input/output of a function call, replacing the operators in an expression, etc.

We conducted an evaluation on 60 vulnerabilities of with the totals of 176 releases in 119 open-source software systems. The result shows that SecureSync is able to detect recurring vulnerabilities with high accuracy and to identify several vulnerable code locations that are not yet reported or fixed even in mature systems.