README.md

metadata

license: cc-by-4.0

Description

This dataset accompanies the paper Why Not Fix It Once and for All? An Empirical Study of Multiple Patches for Vulnerability Fixes in Open-Source Software. It contains 1,581 manually annotated and cleaned records of vulnerabilities fixed by multiple patches.

Data Structure

MultiPatch is stored in jsonl format. Each line corresponds to one CVE and contains the following keys.

{
  "CVE_ID": "the CVE identifier, e.g. CVE-2021-3156, type: str",
  "category": "one or more categories from the list below, type: str",
  "patches": [
    {
      "commit_url": "URL of the fix commit, type: str",
      "diff_code": "the diff code of the patch, type: str",
      "owner": "the owner id of the repository, type: str", 
      "repo_name": "the repository name, type: str", 
      "commit_message": "commit message, type: str"
    }
  ]
}

Category. A CVE may belong to one or more of the following categories:

• Fixes for Multiple Locations Across Different Branches or Projects
• Incomplete Fixes
• Fix and Documentation Updates
• Bug-Introducing Fixes
• Multi-Location Fixes
• Workaround and Formal Fix

Citation

@article{qi2026not,
  title={Why Not Fix It Once and for All? An Empirical Study of Multiple Patches for Vulnerability Fixes in Open-Source Software},
  author={Qi, Weiliang and Li, Youpeng and Wang, Xinda},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13206},
  year={2026}
}