NSF-NSERC: SaTC: CORE: Small: Managing Risks of AI-generated Code in the Software Supply Chain

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Modern software is created by combining pre-existing software packages into a software product. This approach is enabled by the growing popularity of the Open-Source paradigm, where the source code of software packages is made available under licenses that allow reuse. This approach speeds up software development with significant economic benefits, but also creates the risk of inadvertently importing vulnerable code into critical software tools. The risk is further compounded by the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for code generation in Open-Source development. These tools must be trained on enormous amounts of data, which is not always rigorously reviewed, and thus they may learn to generate vulnerable code. To make matters worse, malicious parties may actively inject malicious code in their training set. Unfortunately, all these issues are still poorly understood. This project aims at measuring and mitigating the risks emerging from AI-generated code in the software supply chain. It will investigate how prevalent the use of AI tools is, and characterize the security risks they entail. In doing so, it will address pressing economic and societal needs: AI promises to bring significant benefits to software development, but those can only be achieved if its risks are mitigated. The research outcomes will be disseminated through workshops and hackathons, and the results will become part of curriculum and courses. The work will benefit the open-source community by producing provenance tools to improve software supply chain security. The project is a collaboration with researchers from Canada with complementary expertise that provides additional resources to the project. Technically, the AI tools being investigated consist of various Large Language Models (LLM) for code generation. The threat model of interest is one where a developer inserts vulnerable LLM-generated code into a security-critical program, be it due to low-quality code generation or using a poisoned/backdoored LLM. This project consists of three thrusts, each addressing a research question relevant to the threat model: (i) how, and to what extent, LLM code can be distinguished from code written by humans; (ii) to what extent LLM code is already present in the supply chain, and what are its security implications; and (iii) to what extent poisoning attacks against LLM code generation can succeed in realistic conditions. In thrust (i), this project extends existing code stylometry techniques, until now used to distinguish human programmers, to the novel problem of distinguishing human- and LLM-generated code. In thrust (ii), the investigators conduct measurement studies of Open-Source software, generating empirical understanding of the presence and implications of LLM-generated code in the supply chain. Finally, thrust (iii) looks at the practical feasibility of code backdoors, and the effectiveness of automated reputation-based vetting as a defense.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.