A Comparative Study on Vulnerabilities in Categories of Clones and Non-cloned Code

Code clones are serious code smells. To investigate bug-proneness of clones as opposed to clone-free source code, earlier attempts have studied the stability of code clones and their contributions to program faults. This paper presents a comparative study on different types of clones and non-cloned code on the basis of their vulnerabilities, which may lead to software defects and issues in future. The empirical study along this new dimension examines source code of 97 software systems and derives results based on quantitative analysis with statistical significance. The findings from this work add to our under-standing of the characteristics and impacts of clones, which can be useful in clone-aware software development and in devising techniques for minimizing the negative impacts of code clones.