Prioritization of Exploit Codes on GitHub for Better Vulnerability Triage

Kentaro Kita, Yuta Gempei, Tomoaki Mimoto, Takamasa Isohara, Shinsaku Kiyomoto, Toshiaki Tanaka

2025

Abstract

Analyzing exploit codes is essential for assessing the severity of vulnerabilities and developing effective defense measures against future exploits. Whereas ExploitDB and Metasploit are two major sources of exploit codes, GitHub has been rapidly growing into a promising platform for sharing exploit codes. However, prioritizing GitHub exploit codes to be analyzed in depth is challenging, owing to its large collection of codes and the absence of mechanisms for guaranteeing the validity of codes published by users. To address this problem, this paper proposes a scheme to prioritize GitHub exploit codes based on their source codes and repository metadata. First, we show that GitHub often contains different but semantically similar exploit codes targeting the same vulnerability, and such duplicated codes can be efficiently removed with code clone detection techniques. Second, we leverage a feature of GitHub that it plays the role of a social networking platform. By mining a graph that represents relationships among GitHub users, our scheme prioritizes exploit codes by taking both the reputation from users and security community’s attention to targeted vulnerabilities into consideration.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kita K., Gempei Y., Mimoto T., Isohara T., Kiyomoto S. and Tanaka T. (2025). Prioritization of Exploit Codes on GitHub for Better Vulnerability Triage. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP; ISBN 978-989-758-735-1, SciTePress, pages 27-38. DOI: 10.5220/0013100800003899

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp25,
author={Kentaro Kita and Yuta Gempei and Tomoaki Mimoto and Takamasa Isohara and Shinsaku Kiyomoto and Toshiaki Tanaka},
title={Prioritization of Exploit Codes on GitHub for Better Vulnerability Triage},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP},
year={2025},
pages={27-38},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013100800003899},
isbn={978-989-758-735-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP
TI - Prioritization of Exploit Codes on GitHub for Better Vulnerability Triage
SN - 978-989-758-735-1
AU - Kita K.
AU - Gempei Y.
AU - Mimoto T.
AU - Isohara T.
AU - Kiyomoto S.
AU - Tanaka T.
PY - 2025
SP - 27
EP - 38
DO - 10.5220/0013100800003899
PB - SciTePress