Tug-of-War within A Decade: Conflict Resolution in Vulnerability Analysis via Teacher-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generations

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential for analyzing and addressing vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. However, among over 200,000 vulnerabilities were discovered in the past decade, more than 30,000 have been changed or updated. This necessitates frequent updates to the training datasets and internal knowledge bases of LLMs to maintain knowledge consistency. In this paper, we focus on the problem of knowledge discrepancy and conflict within CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) detection and analysis. This problem hinders LLMs' ability to retrieve the latest knowledge from original training datasets, leading to knowledge conflicts, fabrications of factually incorrect results, and generation hallucinations. To address this problem, we propose an innovative two-stage framework called CRVA-TGRAG (Conflict Resolution in Vulnerability Analysis via Teacher-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation). First, to improve document retrieval accuracy during the retrieval stage, we utilize Parent Document Segmentation and an ensemble retrieval scheme based on semantic similarity and inverted indexing. Second, to enhance LLMs' capabilities based on the retrieval of CVE dataset in generation stage, we employ a teacher-guided preference optimization technique to fine-tune LLMs. Our framework not only enhances the quality of content retrieval through RAG but also leverages the advantages of preference fine-tuning in LLMs to answer questions more effectively and precisely. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves higher accuracy in retrieving the latest CVEs compared to external knowledge bases. In conclusion, our framework significantly mitigates potential knowledge conflicts and inconsistencies that may arise from relying solely on LLMs for knowledge retrieval.