Papers › CVEfixes: Automated Collection of Vulnerabilities and Their Fixes from Open-Source Software

CVEfixes: Automated Collection of Vulnerabilities and Their Fixes from Open-Source Software

19 Jul 2021arXiv:2107.08760archive 2025-07-28

Guru Prasad Bhandari, Amara Naseer, Leon Moonen

Data-driven research on the automated discovery and repair of security vulnerabilities in source code requires comprehensive datasets of real-life vulnerable code and their fixes. To assist in such research, we propose a method to automatically collect and curate a comprehensive vulnerability dataset from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in the public National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We implement our approach in a fully automated dataset collection tool and share an initial release of the resulting vulnerability dataset named CVEfixes. The CVEfixes collection tool automatically fetches all available CVE records from the NVD, gathers the vulnerable code and corresponding fixes from associated open-source repositories, and organizes the collected information in a relational database. Moreover, the dataset is enriched with meta-data such as programming language, and detailed code and security metrics at five levels of abstraction. The collection can easily be repeated to keep up-to-date with newly discovered or patched vulnerabilities. The initial release of CVEfixes spans all published CVEs up to 9 June 2021, covering 5365 CVE records for 1754 open-source projects that were addressed in a total of 5495 vulnerability fixing commits. CVEfixes supports various types of data-driven software security research, such as vulnerability prediction, vulnerability classification, vulnerability severity prediction, analysis of vulnerability-related code changes, and automated vulnerability repair.

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secureIT-project/CVEfixes officialmentioned in paper report
tqrg/security-patches-dataset mentioned on GitHubMIT report

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1ran · our draft was wrong

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clean_string secureIT-project/CVEfixes/Code/collect_commits.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · bee7848557c8eb49 · report

Tasks

severity prediction

Datasets

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CVEfixes

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Repair

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