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Supply chain security is extremely important for modern applications running at scale in the cloud. In fact, they involve a large number of heterogeneous microservices that also include third-party software. As a result, security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jacopo Bufalino , Mario Di Francesco , Agathe Blaise , Stefano Secci

LLM-based coding agents extend their capabilities via third-party agent skills distributed through open marketplaces without mandatory security review. Unlike traditional packages, these skills are executed as operational directives with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yubin Qu , Yi Liu , Tongcheng Geng , Gelei Deng , Yuekang Li , Leo Yu Zhang , Ying Zhang , Lei Ma

The rise of user-contributed Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems demonstrate their prevalence in the software engineering discipline. Libraries work together by depending on each other across the ecosystem. From these ecosystems emerges a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Ali Ouni , Daniel M. German , Katsuro Inoue

Software supply chains, while providing immense economic and software development value, are only as strong as their weakest link. Over the past several years, there has been an exponential increase in cyberattacks specifically targeting…

Relying on dependency packages accelerates software development, but it also increases the exposure to security vulnerabilities that may be present in dependencies. While developers have full control over which dependency packages (and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Abbas Javan Jafari , Diego Elias Costa , Ahmad Abdellatif , Emad Shihab

Modern software supply chain attacks consist of introducing new, malicious capabilities into trusted third-party software components, in order to propagate to a victim through a package dependency chain. These attacks are especially…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Carmine Cesarano , Martin Monperrus , Roberto Natella

Python applications depend on third-party native libraries that may be vendored within package distributions or installed on the host system. When vulnerabilities are discovered in these native libraries, determining which Python packages…

Software supply-chain attacks are an important and ongoing concern in the open source software ecosystem. These attacks maintain the standard functionality that a component implements, but additionally hide malicious functionality activated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Evangelos Lamprou , Julian Dai , Grigoris Ntousakis , Martin C. Rinard , Nikos Vasilakis

This paper presents results from the MSR 2021 Hackathon. Our team investigates files/projects that contain known security vulnerabilities and how widespread they are throughout repositories in open source software. These security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-24 David Reid , Kalvin Eng , Chris Bogart , Adam Tutko

Recent years have shown increased cyber attacks targeting less secure elements in the software supply chain and causing fatal damage to businesses and organizations. Past well-known examples of software supply chain attacks are the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Trevor Dunlap , Yasemin Acar , Michel Cucker , William Enck , Alexandros Kapravelos , Christian Kastner , Laurie Williams

Understanding vulnerability propagation is essential for assessing how vulnerabilities spread across components of a software package. This supports more accurate impact analysis and enhances threat detection and mitigation. In this paper,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Michael Robinson , Sajal Halder , Muhammad Ejaz Ahmed , Muhammad Ikram , Seyit Camtepe , Hyoungshick Kim

As modern software extensively uses free open source packages as dependencies, developers have to regularly pull in new third-party code through frequent updates. However, without a proper review of every incoming change, vulnerable and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Nasif Imtiaz , Laurie Williams

Software supply chain attacks have become a significant threat as software development increasingly relies on contributions from multiple, often unverified sources. The code from unverified sources does not pose a threat until it is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Aman Sharma , Martin Wittlinger , Benoit Baudry , Martin Monperrus

Modern software applications heavily rely on diverse third-party components, libraries, and frameworks sourced from various vendors and open source repositories, presenting a complex challenge for securing the software supply chain. To…

Language-based ecosystems (LBE), i.e., software ecosystems based on a single programming language, are very common. Examples include the npm ecosystem for JavaScript, and PyPI for Python. These environments encourage code reuse between…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Ruturaj K. Vaidya , Lorenzo De Carli , Drew Davidson , Vaibhav Rastogi

The increasing frequency and sophistication of software supply chain attacks pose severe risks to critical infrastructure sectors, threatening national security, economic stability, and public safety. Despite growing awareness, existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Liming Dong , Sung Une Lee , Zhenchang Xing , Muhammad Ejaz Ahmed , Stefan Avgoustakis

Recent years have shown increased cyber attacks targeting less secure elements in the software supply chain and causing fatal damage to businesses and organizations. Past well-known examples of software supply chain attacks are the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Mindy Tran , Yasemin Acar , Michel Cucker , William Enck , Alexandros Kapravelos , Christian Kastner , Laurie Williams

In recent years, there has been a growing concern with software integrity, that is, the assurance that software has not been tampered with on the path between developers and users. This path is represented by a software development pipeline…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-11-14 B. M. Reichert , R. R. Obelheiro

The popularity of Python has risen rapidly over the past 15 years. It is a major language in some of the most exciting technologies today. This popularity has led to a large ecosystem of third-party packages available via the pip package…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Aadesh Bagmar , Josiah Wedgwood , Dave Levin , Jim Purtilo

AI systems rest on software with low integrity mechanisms, leaving AI systems exposed across every stage from data acquisition to final inference. This paper makes the AI supply chain a first-class object of analysis, decomposing it across…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Carmine Cesarano , Martin Monperrus