Abstract:Despite recent advances, frontier large language model (LLM) agents remain limited in discovering and patching complex vulnerabilities in real-world software. Generally available agents can already aid attackers, who only need to find one exploitable weakness, while defenders must continuously identify and patch all vulnerabilities across fast-growing codebases. Stronger defensive agents would help close this gap, yet the scarcity of security training data with reproducible build and execution environments remains a bottleneck. We present CyberForge, a framework that synthesizes executable, repository-level security training data by injecting vulnerabilities into real C/C++ projects. It validates each instance dynamically: the injected build must pass the project's unit tests, and generated proof-of-vulnerability (PoV) must trigger on the injected build and not on the clean one. CyberForge is not limited by the availability of disclosed vulnerabilities, therefore it can scale in comparison to data augmentation techniques which rely on historic CVE data. The resulting corpus holds 1034 validated vulnerabilities across 80 projects and 63 weakness categories, with edit locality similar to real CVE patches under a real-versus-real noise floor. Fine-tuning on trajectories collected over this corpus improves SEC-bench patch repair by +3.3 to +14.7 points, in all six configurations of three model scales and two teachers, with the 31B student reaching its GPT-5.4-mini teacher, 72.7% against 74.0%. These gains generalize out of distribution to PatchEval, a corpus containing other programming languages, where every configuration also improves and the 31B student passes its teacher.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a popular choice in vulnerability detection studies given their foundational capabilities, open source availability, and variety of models, but have limited scalability due to extensive compute requirements. Using the natural graph relational structure of code, we show that our proposed graph neural network (GNN) based deep learning model VulGNN for vulnerability detection can achieve performance almost on par with LLMs, but is 100 times smaller in size and fast to retrain and customize. We describe the VulGNN architecture, ablation studies on components, learning rates, and generalizability to different code datasets. As a lightweight model for vulnerability analysis, VulGNN is efficient and deployable at the edge as part of real-world software development pipelines.
Abstract:The increasing complexity of software systems and the sophistication of cyber-attacks have underscored the critical need for effective automated vulnerability detection and repair systems. Traditional methods, such as static program analysis, face significant challenges related to scalability, adaptability, and high false-positive and false-negative rates. AI-driven approaches, particularly those using machine learning and deep learning models, show promise but are heavily reliant on the quality and quantity of training data. This paper introduces a novel framework designed to automatically introduce realistic, category-specific vulnerabilities into secure C/C++ codebases to generate datasets. The proposed approach coordinates multiple AI agents that simulate expert reasoning, along with function agents and traditional code analysis tools. It leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation for contextual grounding and employs Low-Rank approximation of weights for efficient model fine-tuning. Our experimental study on 116 code samples from three different benchmarks suggests that our approach outperforms other techniques with regard to dataset accuracy, achieving between 89\% and 95\% success rates in injecting vulnerabilities at function level.