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Modern software systems rely on dependency networks of reusable libraries, where breaking changes propagate and cause downstream consumers to fail. Despite growing research across ecosystems, no comprehensive synthesis exists. We conduct a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Juntao Chen , Tingting Bi , Yanlin Wang , Patanamon Thongtanunam

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Lyuye Zhang , Chengwei Liu , Sen Chen , Zhengzi Xu , Lingling Fan , Lida Zhao , Yiran Zhang , Yang Liu

The paper presents a traceability analysis of how over 84 thousand vulnerabilities have propagated across 28 open source software ecosystems. According to the results, the propagation sequences have been complex in general, although GitHub,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Jukka Ruohonen , Qusai Ramadan

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

Regular dependency updates protect dependent software components from upstream bugs, security vulnerabilities, and poor code quality. Measures of dependency updates across software ecosystems involve two key dimensions: the time span during…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Baltasar Berretta , Augustus Thomas , Heather Guarnera

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

The Maven Central Repository provides an extraordinary source of data to understand complex architecture and evolution phenomena among Java applications. As of September 6, 2018, this repository includes 2.8M artifacts (compiled piece of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-01-17 Amine Benelallam , Nicolas Harrand , César Soto Valero , Benoit Baudry , Olivier Barais

Background: Modern software uses many third-party libraries and frameworks as dependencies. Known vulnerabilities in these dependencies are a potential security risk. Software composition analysis (SCA) tools, therefore, are being…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-02 Nasif Imtiaz , Seaver Thorne , Laurie Williams

Understanding the structural characteristics and connectivity patterns of large-scale software ecosystems is critical for enhancing software reuse, improving ecosystem resilience, and mitigating security risks. In this paper, we investigate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Daniel Ogenrwot , John Businge , Shaikh Arifuzzaman

Software vulnerabilities have a large negative impact on the software systems that we depend on daily. Reports on software vulnerabilities always paint a grim picture, with some reports showing that 83% of organizations depend on vulnerable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Mahmoud Alfadel , Diego Elias Costa , Mouafak Mokhallalati , Emad Shihab , Bram Adams

The sustainability of libraries is critical for modern software development, yet many libraries face abandonment, posing significant risks to dependent projects. This study explores the prevalence and patterns of library abandonment in the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Kazi Amit Hasan , Jerin Yasmin , Huizi Hao , Yuan Tian , Safwat Hassan , Steven Ding

Python software development heavily relies on third-party packages. Direct and transitive dependencies create a labyrinth of software supply chains. While it is convenient to reuse code, vulnerabilities within these dependency chains can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jacob Mahon , Chenxi Hou , Zhihao Yao

Software security mainly studies vulnerability detection: is my code vulnerable today? This hinders risk estimation, so new approaches are emerging to forecast the occurrence of future vulnerabilities. While useful, these approaches are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Carlos E. Budde , Ranindya Paramitha , Fabio Massacci

A risk in adopting third-party dependencies into an application is their potential to serve as a doorway for malicious code to be injected (most often unknowingly). While many initiatives from both industry and research communities focus on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Christoph Treude , Kenichi Matsumoto

Open-source software (OSS) dependencies are a dominant component of modern software code bases. Using proven and well-tested OSS components lets developers reduce development time and cost while improving quality. However, heavy reliance on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Stefan Schott , Serena Elisa Ponta , Wolfram Fischer , Jonas Klauke , Eric Bodden

Large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, revolutionizing various fields. Despite their widespread success, LLMs heavily rely on external code dependencies from package management systems, creating a complex and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Shuhan Liu , Xing Hu , Xin Xia , David Lo , Xiaohu Yang

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

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…

Vulnerabilities in open-source software can cause cascading effects in the modern digital ecosystem. It is especially worrying if these vulnerabilities repeat across many projects, as once the adversaries find one of them, they can scale up…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jafar Akhoundali , Hamidreza Hamidi , Kristian Rietveld , Olga Gadyatskaya

We propose and release a new vulnerable source code dataset. We curate the dataset by crawling security issue websites, extracting vulnerability-fixing commits and source codes from the corresponding projects. Our new dataset contains…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Yizheng Chen , Zhoujie Ding , Lamya Alowain , Xinyun Chen , David Wagner