Related papers: On the Use of Refactoring in Security Vulnerabilit…
In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape and advanced software development, the rise in cyber security attacks has become a pressing concern. The integration of robust cyber security defenses has become essential across all…
In modern software ecosystems, dependency management plays a critical role in ensuring secure and maintainable applications. However, understanding the relationship between release practices and their impact on vulnerabilities and update…
Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have…
Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers' productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more…
Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…
In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…
Modern software projects depend on many third-party libraries, complicating reproducible and secure builds. Several package managers address this with the generation of a lockfile that freezes dependency versions and can be used to verify…
Context. Refactoring has been widely investigated in the past in relation to production code quality, yet still little is known on how developers apply refactoring on test code. Specifically, there is still a lack of investigation into how…
Software security is of utmost importance for most software systems. Developers must systematically select, plan, design, implement, and especially, maintain and evolve security features -- functionalities to mitigate attacks or protect…
Although using third-party libraries is common practice when writing software, vulnerabilities may be found even in well-known libraries. Detected vulnerabilities are often fixed quickly in the library code. The easiest way to include these…
With the urgent need to secure supply chains among Open Source libraries, attention has focused on mitigating vulnerabilities detected in these libraries. Although awareness has improved recently, most studies still report delays in the…
An essential part of software maintenance and evolution, refactoring is performed by developers, regardless of technology or domain, to improve the internal quality of the system, and reduce its technical debt. However, choosing the…
The Log4j-Core vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, exposed significant challenges to dependency management in software ecosystems. When a critical vulnerability is disclosed, it is imperative that dependent packages quickly adopt patched…
Reusing third-party libraries increases productivity and saves time and costs for developers. However, the downside is the presence of vulnerabilities in those libraries, which can lead to catastrophic outcomes. For instance, Apache Log4J…
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…
Reviewing source code from a security perspective has proven to be a difficult task. Indeed, previous research has shown that developers often miss even popular and easy-to-detect vulnerabilities during code review. Initial evidence…
Vulnerabilities from third-party libraries (TPLs) have been unveiled to threaten the Maven ecosystem. Despite patches being released promptly after vulnerabilities are disclosed, the libraries and applications in the community still use the…
In this paper, we analyze the Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) dictionary and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) feeds. These repositories are widely used in Vulnerability Management Systems (VMSs) to check for known…
As the complexity and size of software projects increases in real-world environments, maintaining and creating maintainable and dependable code becomes harder and more costly. Refactoring is considered as a method for enhancing the internal…
Data-driven research on the automated discovery and repair of security vulnerabilities in source code requires comprehensive datasets of real-life vulnerable code and their fixes. To assist in such research, we propose a method to…