Security Weaknesses of Copilot Generated Code in GitHub

Modern code generation tools use AI models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), to generate functional and complete code. While such tools are becoming popular and widely available for developers, using these tools is often accompanied by security challenges. Therefore, it is important to assess the quality of the generated code, especially in terms of its security. Researchers have recently explored various aspects of code generation tools, including security. However, many open questions about the security of the generated code require further investigation, especially the security issues of automatically generated code in the wild. To this end, we conducted an empirical study by analyzing the security weaknesses in code snippets generated by GitHub Copilot that are found as part of publicly available projects hosted on GitHub. The goal is to investigate the types of security issues and their scale in real-world scenarios (rather than crafted scenarios). To this end, we identified 435 code snippets generated by Copilot from publicly available projects. We then conducted extensive security analysis to identify Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) instances in these code snippets. The results show that (1) 35.8% of Copilot generated code snippets contain CWEs, and those issues are spread across multiple languages, (2) the security weaknesses are diverse and related to 42 different CWEs, in which CWE-78: OS Command Injection, CWE-330: Use of Insufficiently Random Values, and CWE-703: Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions occurred the most frequently, and (3) among the 42 CWEs identified, 11 of those belong to the currently recognized 2022 CWE Top-25. Our findings confirm that developers should be careful when adding code generated by Copilot (and similar AI code generation tools) and should also run appropriate security checks as they accept the suggested code.