Context: Coordination is a fundamental tenet of software engineering. Coordination is required also for identifying discovered and disclosed software vulnerabilities with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Motivated by recent practical challenges, this paper examines the coordination of CVEs for open source projects through a public mailing list. Objective: The paper observes the historical time delays between the assignment of CVEs on a mailing list and the later appearance of these in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Drawing from research on software engineering coordination, software vulnerabilities, and bug tracking, the delays are modeled through three dimensions: social networks and communication practices, tracking infrastructures, and the technical characteristics of the CVEs coordinated. Method: Given a period between 2008 and 2016, a sample of over five thousand CVEs is used to model the delays with nearly fifty explanatory metrics. Regression analysis is used for the modeling. Results: The results show that the CVE coordination delays are affected by different abstractions for noise and prerequisite constraints. These abstractions convey effects from the social network and infrastructure dimensions. Particularly strong effect sizes are observed for annual and monthly control metrics, a control metric for weekends, the degrees of the nodes in the CVE coordination networks, and the number of references given in NVD for the CVEs archived. Smaller but visible effects are present for metrics measuring the entropy of the emails exchanged, traces to bug tracking systems, and other related aspects. The empirical signals are weaker for the technical characteristics. Conclusion: [...]
Software vulnerabilities can have serious consequences, which is why many techniques have been proposed to defend against them. Among these, vulnerability detection techniques are a major area of focus. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive approach for benchmarking these proposed techniques. In this paper, we present the first survey that comprehensively investigates and summarizes the current state of software vulnerability detection benchmarking. We review the current literature on benchmarking vulnerability detection, including benchmarking approaches in technique-proposing papers an…
The use of learning-based techniques to achieve automated software vulnerability detection has been of longstanding interest within the software security domain. These data-driven solutions are enabled by large software vulnerability datasets used for training and benchmarking. However, we observe that the quality of the data powering these solutions is currently ill-considered, hindering the reliability and value of produced outcomes. Whilst awareness of software vulnerability data preparation challenges is growing, there has been little investigation into the potential negative impacts of so…
To build a secure communications software, Vulnerability Prediction Models (VPMs) are used to predict vulnerable software modules in the software system before software security testing. At present many software security metrics have been proposed to design a VPM. In this paper, we predict vulnerable classes in a software system by establishing the system's weighted software network. The metrics are obtained from the nodes' attributes in the weighted software network. We design and implement a crawler tool to collect all public security vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox. Based on these data, …
Software Vulnerability Prediction (SVP) is a data-driven technique for software quality assurance that has recently gained considerable attention in the Software Engineering research community. However, the difficulties of preparing Software Vulnerability (SV) related data is considered as the main barrier to industrial adoption of SVP approaches. Given the increasing, but dispersed, literature on this topic, it is needed and timely to systematically select, review, and synthesize the relevant peer-reviewed papers reporting the existing SV data preparation techniques and challenges. We have ca…
While the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on software professionals and organizations are difficult to predict, it seems likely that working from home, remote-first teams, distributed teams, and hybrid (part-remote/part-office) teams will be more common. It is therefore important to investigate the challenges that software teams and organizations face with new remote and hybrid work. Consequently, this paper reports a year-long, participant-observation, constructivist grounded theory study investigating the impact of working from home on software development. This study resulted in …
Several disastrous security attacks can be attributed to delays in patching software vulnerabilities. While researchers and practitioners have paid significant attention to automate vulnerabilities identification and patch development activities of software security patch management, there has been relatively little effort dedicated to gain an in-depth understanding of the socio-technical aspects, e.g., coordination of interdependent activities of the patching process and patching decisions, that may cause delays in applying security patches. We report on a Grounded Theory study of the role of…
JavaBIP allows the coordination of software components by clearly separating the functional and coordination aspects of the system behavior. JavaBIP implements the principles of the BIP component framework rooted in rigorous operational semantics. Recent work both on BIP and JavaBIP allows the coordination of static components defined prior to system deployment, i.e., the architecture of the coordinated system is fixed in terms of its component instances. Nevertheless, modern systems, often make use of components that can register and deregister dynamically during system execution. In this pap…
Preventing vulnerability exploits is a critical software maintenance task, and software engineers often rely on Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVEs) reports for information about vulnerable systems and libraries. These reports include descriptions, disclosure sources, and manually-populated vulnerability characteristics such as root cause from the NIST Vulnerability Description Ontology (VDO). This information needs to be complete and accurate so stakeholders of affected products can prevent and react to exploits of the reported vulnerabilities. However, characterizing each report requires…
Background: Modern software uses many third-party libraries and frameworks as dependencies. Known vulnerabilities in these dependencies are a potential security risk. Software composition analysis (SCA) tools, therefore, are being increasingly adopted by practitioners to keep track of vulnerable dependencies. Aim: The goal of this study is to understand the difference in vulnerability reporting by various SCA tools. Understanding if and how existing SCA tools differ in their analysis may help security practitioners to choose the right tooling and identify future research needs. Method: We pres…
Today's dynamic and iterative development environment brings significant challenges for software project management. In distributed project settings, "management by walking around" is no longer an option and project managers may miss out on key project insights. The TESNA (TEchnical Social Network Analysis) method and tool aims to provide project managers both a method and a tool for gaining insights and taking corrective action. TESNA achieves this by analysing a project's evolving social and technical network structures using data from multiple sources, including CVS, email and chat reposito…
The present business network infrastructure is quickly varying with latest servers, services, connections, and ports added often, at times day by day, and with a uncontrollably inflow of laptops, storage media and wireless networks. With the increasing amount of vulnerabilities and exploits coupled with the recurrent evolution of IT infrastructure, organizations at present require more numerous vulnerability assessments. In this paper new approach the Unified process for Network vulnerability Assessments hereafter called as a unified NVA is proposed for network vulnerability assessment derived…
Given the relevance of coordination in the field of global software engineering, this work was carried out to further understand coordination mechanisms. Specifically, we investigated meetings and the collaboration tool Slack. We conducted a longitudinal case study using a mixed-methods approach with surveys, observations, interviews, and chat logs. Our quantitative results show that employees in global projects spend 7 hours 45 minutes per week on average in scheduled meetings and 8 hours 54 minutes in unscheduled meetings. Furthermore, distributed teams were significantly larger than co-loca…
Software products are rarely developed from scratch and vulnerabilities in such products might reside in parts that are either open source software or provided by another organization. Hence, the total cybersecurity of a product often depends on cooperation, explicit or implicit, between several organizations. We study the attitudes and practices of companies in software ecosystems towards sharing vulnerability information. Furthermore, we compare these practices to contemporary cybersecurity recommendations. This is performed through a questionnaire-based qualitative survey. The questionnaire…
Vulnerability detection plays a key role in secure software development. There are many different vulnerability detection tools and techniques to choose from, and insufficient information on which vulnerability detection techniques to use and when. The goal of this research is to assist managers and other decision-makers on software projects in making informed choices about the use of different software vulnerability detection techniques through empirical analysis of the efficiency and effectiveness of each technique. We will examine the relationships between the vulnerability detection techni…
Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source projects, we examine and discuss the evolutionary principles that govern the coordination of developers. By applying a network-analytic approach, we found that the implicit and self-organizing structure of developer coordination is ubiquitously described by non-random organizational principles that defy conventional software-engineering wisdom. In particular, we fo…
The notion of Attack Surface refers to the critical points on the boundary of a software system which are accessible from outside or contain valuable content for attackers. The ability to identify attack surface components of software system has a significant role in effectiveness of vulnerability analysis approaches. Most prior works focus on vulnerability techniques that use an approximation of attack surfaces and there has not been many attempt to create a comprehensive list of attack surface components. Although limited number of studies have focused on attack surface analysis, they define…
Mainstream software applications and tools are the configurable platforms with an enormous number of parameters along with their values. Certain settings and possible interactions between these parameters may harden (or soften) the security and robustness of these applications against some known vulnerabilities. However, the large number of vulnerabilities reported and associated with these tools make the exhaustive testing of these tools infeasible against these vulnerabilities infeasible. As an instance of general software testing problem, the research question to address is whether the syst…
