Open-source software (OSS) greatly facilitates program development for developers. However, the high number of vulnerabilities in open-source software is a major concern, including in Golang, a relatively new programming language. In contrast to other commonly used OSS package managers, Golang presents a distinctive feature whereby commits are prevalently used as dependency versions prior to their integration into official releases. This attribute can prove advantageous to users, as patch commits can be implemented in a timely manner before the releases. However, Golang employs a decentralized mechanism for managing dependencies, whereby dependencies are upheld and distributed in separate repositories. This approach can result in delays in the dissemination of patches and unresolved vulnerabilities.
To tackle the aforementioned concern, a comprehensive investigation was undertaken to examine the life cycle of vulnerability in Golang, commencing from its introduction and culminating with its rectification. To this end, a framework was established by gathering data from diverse sources and systematically amalgamating them with an algorithm to compute the lags in vulnerability patching. It turned out that 66.10% of modules in the Golang ecosystem were affected by vulnerabilities. Within the vulnerability life cycle, we found two kinds of lag impeding the propagation of vulnerability fixing. By analyzing reasons behind non-lagged and lagged vulnerabilities, timely releasing and indexing patch versions could significantly enhance ecosystem security.
With its unique advantages such as decentralization and immutability, blockchain technology has been widely used in various fields in recent years. The smart contract running on the blockchain is also playing an increasingly important role in decentralized application scenarios. Therefore, the automatic detection of security vulnerabilities in smart contracts has become an urgent problem in the application of blockchain technology. Hyperledger Fabric is a smart contract platform based on enterprise-level licensed distributed ledger technology. However, the research on the vulnerability detecti…
Currently, little is known about the structure of the Cargo ecosystem and the potential for vulnerability propagation. Many empirical studies generalize third-party dependency governance strategies from a single software ecosystem to other ecosystems but ignore the differences in the technical structures of different software ecosystems, making it difficult to directly generalize security governance strategies from other ecosystems to the Cargo ecosystem. To fill the gap in this area, this paper constructs a knowledge graph of dependency vulnerabilities for the Cargo ecosystem using techniques…
Third-party libraries with rich functionalities facilitate the fast development of Node.js software, but also bring new security threats that vulnerabilities could be introduced through dependencies. In particular, the threats could be excessively amplified by transitive dependencies. Existing research either considers direct dependencies or reasoning transitive dependencies based on reachability analysis, which neglects the NPM-specific dependency resolution rules, resulting in wrongly resolved dependencies. Consequently, further fine-grained analysis, such as vulnerability propagation and th…
Software ecosystems are collections of projects that are developed and evolve together in the same environment. Existing literature investigates software ecosystems as isolated entities whose boundaries do not overlap and assumes they are self-contained. However, a number of software projects are distributed in more than one ecosystem. As different aspects, e.g., success, security vulnerabilities, bugs, etc., of such cross-ecosystem packages can affect multiple ecosystems, we investigate the presence and characteristics of these cross-ecosystem packages in 12 large software distributions. We f…
Modern software development is increasingly dependent on components, libraries and frameworks coming from third-party vendors or open-source suppliers and made available through a number of platforms (or forges). This way of writing software puts an emphasis on reuse and on composition, commoditizing the services which modern applications require. On the other hand, bugs and vulnerabilities in a single library living in one such ecosystem can affect, directly or by transitivity, a huge number of other libraries and applications. Currently, only product-level information on library dependencies…
Reusing software libraries is a pillar of modern software engineering. In 2022, the average Java application depends on 40 third-party libraries. Relying on such libraries exposes a project to potential vulnerabilities and may put an application and its users at risk. Unfortunately, research on software ecosystems has shown that the number of projects that are affected by such vulnerabilities is rising. Previous investigations usually reason about dependencies on the dependency level, but we believe that this highly inflates the actual number of affected projects. In this work, we study the ef…
EOSIO is one typical public blockchain platform. It is scalable in terms of transaction speeds and has a growing ecosystem supporting smart contracts and decentralized applications. However, the vulnerabilities within the EOSIO smart contracts have led to serious attacks, which caused serious financial loss to its end users. In this work, we systematically analyzed three typical EOSIO smart contract vulnerabilities and their related attacks. Then we presented EOSFuzzer, a general black-box fuzzing framework to detect vulnerabilities within EOSIO smart contracts. In particular, EOSFuzzer propos…
In finance, leverage is the ratio between assets borrowed from others and one's own assets. A matching situation is present in software: by using free open-source software (FOSS) libraries a developer leverages on other people's code to multiply the offered functionalities with a much smaller own codebase. In finance as in software, leverage magnifies profits when returns from borrowing exceed costs of integration, but it may also magnify losses, in particular in the presence of security vulnerabilities. We aim to understand the level of technical leverage in the FOSS ecosystem and whether it …
The software ecosystem is a trust-rich part of the world. Collaboratively, software engineers trust major hubs in the ecosystem, such as package managers, repository services, and programming language ecosystems. This trust, however, is often broken by vulnerabilities, ransomware, and abuse from malignant actors. But what is trust? In this paper we explore, through twelve in-depth interviews with software engineers, how they perceive trust in their daily work. From the interviews we conclude three things. First, software engineers make a distinction between an adoption factor and a trust facto…
Cross-Ecosystem Vulnerability Analysis for Python Applications
University of Athens（雅典大学）；National Infrastructures for Research and Technology（国家研究与技术基础设施）；Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Technical University of Crete（克里特理工大学）
Third-party libraries (TPLs) are frequently reused in software to reduce development cost and the time to market. However, external library dependencies may introduce vulnerabilities into host applications. The issue of library dependency has received considerable critical attention. Many package managers, such as Maven, Pip, and NPM, are proposed to manage TPLs. Moreover, a significant amount of effort has been put into studying dependencies in language ecosystems like Java, Python, and JavaScript except C/C++. Due to the lack of a unified package manager for C/C++, existing research has only…
Third party libraries are used to integrate existing solutions for common problems and help speed up development. The use of third party libraries, however, can carry risks, for example through vulnerabilities in these libraries. Studying the dependency networks of package managers lets us better understand and mitigate these risks. So far, the dependency networks of the three most important package managers of the Apple ecosystem, CocoaPods, Carthage and Swift PM, have not been studied. We analysed the dependencies for all publicly available open source libraries up to December 2021 and compi…
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…
The Open Source Software movement has been growing exponentially for a number of years with no signs of slowing. Driving this growth is the widespread availability of libraries and frameworks that provide many functionalities. Developers are saving time and money incorporating this functionality into their applications resulting in faster more feature-rich releases. Despite the growing success and the advantages that open source software provides, there is a dark side. Due to its community construction and largely unregulated distribution, the majority of open source software contains bugs, vu…
Open source software ecosystems consist of thousands of interdependent libraries, which users can combine to great effect. Recent work has pointed out two kinds of risks in these systems: that technical problems like bugs and vulnerabilities can spread through dependency links, and that relatively few developers are responsible for maintaining even the most widely used libraries. However, a more holistic diagnosis of systemic risk in software ecosystem should consider how these social and technical sources of risk interact and amplify one another. Motivated by the observation that the same ind…
Bug bounties have become increasingly popular in recent years. This paper discusses bug bounties by framing these theoretically against so-called platform economy. Empirically the interest is on the disclosure of web vulnerabilities through the Open Bug Bounty (OBB) platform between 2015 and late 2017. According to the empirical results based on a dataset covering nearly 160 thousand web vulnerabilities, (i) OBB has been successful as a community-based platform for the dissemination of web vulnerabilities. The platform has also attracted many productive hackers, (ii) but there exists a large p…
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…
