Hong Quy Nguyen

dblp:143/9401 · DBLP profile ↗
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2ranked-venue papers
2as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-0905-6011ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Graph-based explainable vulnerability prediction
Hong Quy Nguyen, Thong Hoang, Khanh Hoa Dam, Aditya Ghose
Inf. Softw. Technol.1
2025 Human-understandable explanation for software vulnerability prediction
abstract
Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the performance of software vulnerability prediction (SVP). To enhance trustworthiness, the SVP highlights predicted lines of code (LoC) that may be vulnerable. However, providing LoC alone is often insufficient for software practitioners, as it lacks detailed information about the nature of the vulnerability. This paper introduces a novel framework that is built on SVP by offering additional explanatory information based on the suggested LoC. Similar to security reports, our framework comprehensively explains the vulnerability aspects, such as Root Cause, Impact, Attack Vector, and Vulnerability Type. The proposed framework is powered by transformer architectures. Specifically, we leverage pre-trained language models for code to fine-tune on two practical datasets: BigVul and Vulnerability Key Aspect, ensuring our framework’s applicability to real-world scenarios. Experiments using the ROUGE and BLEU scores as evaluation metrics show that our framework achieves better performance with CodeT5+, statistically outperforming a baseline study in generating key vulnerability aspects. Additionally, we conducted a small-scale user study with experienced software practitioners to assess the effectiveness of the framework. The results show that 72% of the participants found our framework helpful in accepting the SVP results, and 68% rated the additional explanations as moderately to extremely useful. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board . • A novel framework generates an explanation from the predicted vulnerable lines. • Comprehensive investigations of factors influencing the quality of the framework. • We conducted a user study to validate its usefulness.
Hong Quy Nguyen, Thong Hoang, Khanh Hoa Dam, Guoxin Su, Zhenchang Xing, Qinghua Lu 0001, Jiamou Sun
J. Syst. Softw.1