  Over the last years, software development in domains with high security
demands transitioned from traditional methodologies to uniting modern
approaches from software development and operations (DevOps). Key principles of
DevOps gained more importance and are now applied to security aspects of
software development, resulting in the automation of security-enhancing
activities. In particular, it is common practice to use automated security
testing tools that generate reports after inspecting a software artifact from
multiple perspectives. However, this raises the challenge of generating
duplicate security findings. To identify these duplicate findings manually, a
security expert has to invest resources like time, effort, and knowledge. A
partial automation of this process could reduce the analysis effort, encourage
DevOps principles, and diminish the chance of human error. In this study, we
investigated the potential of applying Natural Language Processing for
clustering semantically similar security findings to support the identification
of problem-specific duplicate findings. Towards this goal, we developed a web
application for annotating and assessing security testing tool reports and
published a human-annotated corpus of clustered security findings. In addition,
we performed a comparison of different semantic similarity techniques for
automatically grouping security findings. Finally, we assess the resulting
clusters using both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods.

Computation and Language;Software Engineering