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The development of open source software (OSS) is a broad field which requires diverse skill sets. For example, maintainers help lead the project and promote its longevity, technical writers assist with documentation, bug reporters identify…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Jenny T. Liang , Thomas Zimmermann , Denae Ford

Open source software (OSS) has been playing a fundamental role in not only information technology but also our social lives. Attracted by various advantages of OSS, increasing commercial companies take extensive participation in open source…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Xuetao Li , Yuxia Zhang , Cailean Osborne , Minghui Zhou , Zhi Jin , Hui Liu

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

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Kristiina Rahkema , Dietmar Pfahl

Zero-day vulnerabilities can be accidentally or maliciously placed in code and can remain in place for years. In this study, we address an aspect of their longevity by considering the likelihood that they will be discovered in the code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Andrew J. Lohn

Open Source Software (OSS) is widely used and carries licenses that indicate the terms under which the software is provided for use, also specifying modification and distribution rules. Ensuring that users are respecting OSS license terms…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Kypros Iacovou , Georgia M. Kapitsaki , Evangelia Vanezi

This work discusses open-source software supply chain attacks and proposes a general taxonomy describing how attackers conduct them. We then provide a list of safeguards to mitigate such attacks. We present our tool "Risk Explorer for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Piergiorgio Ladisa , Serena Elisa Ponta , Antonino Sabetta , Matias Martinez , Olivier Barais

The increasing interest in open source software has led to the emergence of large language-specific package distributions of reusable software libraries, such as npm and RubyGems. These software packages can be subject to vulnerabilities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Ahmed Zerouali , Tom Mens , Alexandre Decan , Coen De Roover

Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators' demands…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Florian Angermeir , Markus Voggenreiter , Fabiola Moyón , Daniel Mendez

In modern software development workflows, the open-source software supply chain contributes significantly to efficient and convenient engineering practices. With increasing system complexity, using open-source software as third-party…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Zihe Yan , Kai Luo , Haoyu Yang , Yang Yu , Zhuosheng Zhang , Guancheng Li

Software supply chain attacks have revealed blind spots in existing SCA tools, which are often limited to a single ecosystem and assess either software artifacts or community activity in isolation. This fragmentation across tools and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ziheng Liu , Runzhi He , Minghui Zhou

Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created - and maintained - synchronously. In this paper we investigate whether production code and the accompanying tests co-evolve by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-25 Andy Zaidman , Bart Van Rompaey , Serge Demeyer , Arie van Deursen

Open source software (OSS) generates trillions of dollars in economic value and has become essential to the technical infrastructures that power organizations worldwide. As these systems increasingly depend on OSS, understanding the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Elijah Kayode Adejumo , Mariam Guizani , Brittany Johnson

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

Secure software is a cornerstone to safe and resilient digital ecosystems. It offers strong foundation to protect users' sensitive data and guard against cyber-threats. The rapidly increasing landscape of digital economy has encouraged…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Irum Rauf , Tamara Lopez , Thein Tun , Marian Petre , Bashar Nuseibeh

This article delves into the strategic approaches and preventive measures necessary to safeguard the software supply chain against evolving threats. It aims to foster an understanding of the challenges and vulnerabilities inherent in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Ahmed Akinsola , Abdullah Akinde

Industrial applications heavily integrate open-source software libraries nowadays. Beyond the benefits that libraries bring, they can also impose a real threat in case a library is affected by a vulnerability but its community is not active…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Alexandros Tsakpinis

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

Open-source projects are essential to software development, but publicly disclosing vulnerabilities without fixes increases the risk of exploitation. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) addresses this issue by promoting robust…

Dependency solving is a hard (NP-complete) problem in all non-trivial component models due to either mutually incompatible versions of the same packages or explicitly declared package conflicts. As such, software upgrade planning needs to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Pietro Abate , Roberto Di Cosmo , Georgios Gousios , Stefano Zacchiroli