Code Characterization with Graph Convolutions and Capsule Networks

We propose SiCaGCN, a learning system to predict the similarity of a given software code to a set of codes that are permitted to run on a computational resource, such as a supercomputer or a cloud server. This code characterization allows us to detect abusive codes. Our system relies on a structural analysis of the control-flow graph of the software codes and two different graph similarity measures: Graph Edit Distance (GED) and a singular values based metric. SiCaGCN combines elements of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN), Capsule networks, attention mechanism, and neural tensor networks. Our experimental results include a study of the trade-offs between the two similarity metrics and two variations of our learning networks, with and without the use of capsules. Our main findings are that the use of capsules reduces mean square error significantly for both similarity metrics. Use of capsules reduces the runtime to calculate the GED while increases the runtime of singular values calculation.