Exploring Automated Vulnerability Identification in JavaScript Code Using Large Language Models

Abstract

JavaScript powers approximately 98.8% of all websites, making vulnerabilities in its code a significant security risk, yet existing detection approaches such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools often fail to identify many real-world vulnerabilities when applied to isolated code snippets. This paper presents an empirical study of Large Language Model (LLM)-based vulnerability identification for JavaScript programs, evaluating three LLM families (Gemini 1.5 Flash, GPT-4o Mini, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B) across multiple prompting strategies (zero-shot, chain-of-thought, few-shot) and fine-tuning approaches on a dataset of 1,125 JavaScript code snippets spanning five Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories: Injection (CWE-74), OS Command Injection (CWE-78), Cross-Site Scripting (CWE-79), SQL Injection (CWE-89), and Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400). Our experiments show that LLMs substantially outperform traditional SAST tools on snippet-level vulnerability identification, with a fine-tuned Gemini 1.5 Flash model achieving 60% detection accuracy compared to near-zero performance from rule-based analyzers. We find that fine-tuning improves accuracy from 29% to 60%, Chain-of-Thought prompting benefits reasoning-capable models such as GPT-4o Mini, few-shot prompting is effective for polymorphic vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting, and performance varies across vulnerability categories, reaching up to 84% accuracy for structured vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection. These results indicate that LLMs provide a practical approach for automated vulnerability identification in JavaScript code, particularly when combined with task-aligned supervision, though they should complement rather than replace existing security analysis workflows due to limited recall and uneven performance across vulnerability types.