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Related papers: Dependency Practices for Vulnerability Mitigation

200 papers

Recent high-profile incidents in open-source software have greatly raised practitioner attention on software supply chain attacks. To guard against potential malicious package updates, security practitioners advocate pinning dependency to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hao He , Bogdan Vasilescu , Christian Kästner

Software developers typically rely upon a large network of dependencies to build their applications. For instance, the NPM package repository contains over 3 million packages and serves tens of billions of downloads weekly. Understanding…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Donald Pinckney , Federico Cassano , Arjun Guha , Jonathan Bell

Modern software development frequently uses third-party packages, raising the concern of supply chain security attacks. Many attackers target popular package managers, like npm, and their users with supply chain attacks. In 2021 there was a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Nusrat Zahan , Thomas Zimmermann , Patrice Godefroid , Brendan Murphy , Chandra Maddila , Laurie Williams

Modern software development relies on package ecosystems where a single declared dependency can pull in many additional transitive packages. This dependency amplification, defined as the ratio of transitive to direct dependencies, has major…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Jahidul Arafat

Nearly every popular programming language comes with one or more package managers. The software packages distributed by such package managers form large software ecosystems. These packaging ecosystems contain a large number of package…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Alexandre Decan , Tom Mens , Philippe Grosjean

Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…

Current software supply chains heavily rely on open-source packages hosted in public repositories. Given the popularity of ecosystems like npm and PyPI, malicious users started to spread malware by publishing open-source packages containing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Piergiorgio Ladisa , Serena Elisa Ponta , Nicola Ronzoni , Matias Martinez , Olivier Barais

Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Abbas Javan Jafari , Diego Elias Costa , Rabe Abdalkareem , Emad Shihab , Nikolaos Tsantalis

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Ruksit Rojpaisarnkit , Hathaichanok Damrongsiri , Christoph Treude , Ali Ouni , Raula Gaikovina Kula

Package managers such as NPM have become essential for software development. The NPM repository hosts over 2 million packages and serves over 43 billion downloads every week. Unfortunately, the NPM dependency solver has several…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Donald Pinckney , Federico Cassano , Arjun Guha , Jon Bell , Massimiliano Culpo , Todd Gamblin

Security vulnerabilities introduced by applications using third-party dependencies are on the increase, caused by the emergence of large ecosystems of libraries such as the NPM packages for JavaScript. Nowadays, libraries depend on each…

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…

Industry practitioners are increasingly concerned with software that contains vulnerable versions of third-party dependencies that are included both directly and transitively. To address this problem, projects are encouraged to both…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Imranur Rahman , Ranindya Paramitha , William Enck , Laurie Williams

The widespread use of package managers like Maven has accelerated software development but has also introduced significant security risks due to vulnerabilities in dependencies. In this study, we analyze the prevalence and impact of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ehtisham Ul Haq , Song Wang , Robert S. Allison

BACKGROUND: Vulnerable dependencies are a known problem in today's open-source software ecosystems because OSS libraries are highly interconnected and developers do not always update their dependencies. AIMS: In this paper we aim to present…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-30 Ivan Pashchenko , Henrik Plate , Serena Elisa Ponta , Antonino Sabetta , Fabio Massacci

Software ecosystems rely on centralized package registries, such as Maven, to enable code reuse and collaboration. However, the interconnected nature of these ecosystems amplifies the risks posed by security vulnerabilities in direct and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Corey Yang-Smith , Ahmad Abdellatif

Reusable software components, typically distributed as packages, are a central paradigm of modern software development. The JavaScript ecosystem serves as a prime example, offering millions of packages with their use being promoted as…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Ben Swierzy , Marc Ohm , Michael Meier

Security policies, such as SECURITY.md files, are now common in open-source projects. They help guide responsible vulnerability reporting and build trust among users and contributors. Despite their growing use, it is still unclear how these…

The degree of dependencies among the modules of a software system is a key attribute to characterize its design structure and its ability to evolve over time. Several design problems are often correlated with undesired dependencies among…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-10-29 J. Andrés Díaz-Pace , Antonela Tommasel , Daniela Godoy

Software development relies on code reuse to minimize costs, creating vulnerability risks through dependencies with substantial economic impact, as seen in the Crowdstrike and HeartBleed incidents. We analyze 52,897 dependencies across…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-02 Cornelius Fritz , Co-Pierre Georg , Angelo Mele , Michael Schweinberger