Related papers: Security Smells in Ansible and Chef Scripts: A Rep…

Building on the computer science concept of code smells, we initiate the study of law smells, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running…

In this work we analyse five popular commercial password managers for security vulnerabilities. Our analysis is twofold. First, we compile a list of previously disclosed vulnerabilities through a comprehensive review of the academic and…

Static analysis has established itself as a weapon of choice for detecting security vulnerabilities. Taint analysis in particular is a very general and powerful technique, where security policies are expressed in terms of forbidden flows,…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

Rust is an emerging, strongly-typed programming language focusing on efficiency and memory safety. With increasing projects adopting Rust, knowing how to use Unsafe Rust is crucial for Rust security. We observed that the description of…

With the increasing reliance on software and automation nowadays, tight deadlines, limited resources, and prioritization of functionality over security can lead to insecure coding practices. When not handled properly, these constraints…

Software supply chain vulnerabilities arise when attackers exploit weaknesses by injecting vulnerable code into widely used packages or libraries within software repositories. While most existing approaches focus on identifying vulnerable…

Language models for code (CodeLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for code-related tasks, outperforming traditional methods and standard machine learning approaches. However, these models are susceptible to security vulnerabilities, drawing…

Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various tasks, their vulnerability to unsafe prompts remains a critical issue. These prompts can lead LLMs to generate responses on illegal or sensitive topics, posing a…

Secure code review is critical at the pre-commit stage, where vulnerabilities must be caught early under tight latency and limited-context constraints. Existing SAST-based checks are noisy and often miss immature, context-dependent…

Given programming languages can provide different types and levels of security support, it is critically important to consider security aspects while selecting programming languages for developing software systems. Inadequate consideration…

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies…

Modern software relies on a multitude of automated testing and quality assurance tools to prevent errors, bugs and potential vulnerabilities. This study sets out to provide a head-to-head, quantitative and qualitative evaluation of six…

Large language models (LLMs) for automatic code generation have achieved breakthroughs in several programming tasks. Their advances in competition-level programming problems have made them an essential pillar of AI-assisted pair…

Code smells signal violations of design principles that degrade the internal quality of evolving software systems. Although many tools detect such anomalies using static metrics, they often ignore the development context in which smells…

Context: Software specifications are usually written in natural language and may suffer from imprecision, ambiguity, and other quality issues, called thereafter, requirement smells. Requirement smells can hinder the development of a project…

Symbolic analysis of security exploits in smart contracts has demonstrated to be valuable for analyzing predefined vulnerability properties. While some symbolic tools perform complex analysis steps, they require a predetermined invocation…

The continuous increase in malware samples, both in sophistication and number, presents many challenges for organizations and analysts, who must cope with thousands of new heterogeneous samples daily. This requires robust methods to quickly…

Efficient code retrieval is critical for developer productivity, yet existing benchmarks largely focus on Python and rarely stress-test robustness beyond superficial lexical cues. To address the gap, we introduce an automated pipeline for…

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that add malicious tokens to an input prompt to bypass the safety guardrails of an LLM and cause it to produce harmful content. In this work, we introduce erase-and-check,…