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Modern software heavily relies on the use of components. Those components are usually published in central repositories, and managed by build systems via dependencies. Due to issues around vulnerabilities, licenses and the propagation of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jens Dietrich , Shawn Rasheed , Alexander Jordan , Tim White

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

Open-source software (OSS) greatly facilitates program development for developers. However, the high number of vulnerabilities in open-source software is a major concern, including in Golang, a relatively new programming language. In…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Jinchang Hu , Lyuye Zhang , Chengwei Liu , Sen Yang , Song Huang , Yang Liu

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Yi Wen Heng , Zeyang Ma , Haoxiang Zhang , Zhenhao Li , Tse-Hsun , Chen

Popular (re)use of third-party open-source software (OSS) is evidence of the impact of hosting repositories like maven on software development today. Updating libraries is crucial, with recent studies highlighting the associated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Raula Gaikovina Kula , Coen De Roover , Daniel M. German , Takashi Ishio , Katsuro Inoue

Security vulnerability in third-party dependencies is a growing concern not only for developers of the affected software, but for the risks it poses to an entire software ecosystem, e.g., Heartbleed vulnerability. Recent studies show that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Bodin Chinthanet , Raula Gaikovina Kula , Shane McIntosh , Takashi Ishio , Akinori Ihara , Kenichi Matsumoto

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

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

Software ecosystems built around programming languages have greatly facilitated software development. At the same time, their security has increasingly been acknowledged as a problem. To this end, the paper examines the previously…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Jukka Ruohonen , Mubashrah Saddiqa

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Sofia Reis , Rui Abreu , Luis Cruz

We study the evolution and impact of bloated dependencies in a single software ecosystem: Java/Maven. Bloated dependencies are third-party libraries that are packaged in the application binary but are not needed to run the application. We…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-06-01 César Soto-Valero , Thomas Durieux , Benoit Baudry

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

The paper examines the handling times of software vulnerabilities in CPython, the reference implementation and interpreter for the today's likely most popular programming language, Python. The background comes from the so-called…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jukka Ruohonen

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) ecosystem underpins a vast portion of modern software infrastructure, powering widely used components such as Log4j, Tomcat, and Struts. However, the ubiquity of these libraries has made them prime…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Derek Garcia , Briana Lee , Ibrahim Matar , David Rickards , Andrew Zilnicki

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

Maven Central is a large popular repository of Java components that has evolved over the last 20 years. The distribution of dependencies indicates that the repository is dominated by a relatively small number of components other components…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Nkiru Ede , Jens Dietrich , Ulrich Zülicke

As the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) continues to grow exponentially, security teams face increasingly difficult decisions about prioritization. Current approaches using Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Naoyuki Shimizu , Masaki Hashimoto

Advancing our understanding of software vulnerabilities, automating their identification, the analysis of their impact, and ultimately their mitigation is necessary to enable the development of software that is more secure. While operating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Serena E. Ponta , Henrik Plate , Antonino Sabetta , Michele Bezzi , Cédric Dangremont

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Larissa Schmid , Elias Lundell , Yogya Gamage , Benoit Baudry , Martin Monperrus

Vulnerabilities in open source packages can be a security risk for the client projects that use these packages as dependencies. When a new vulnerability is discovered in a package, the package should quickly release a fix in a new version,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Nasif Imtiaz , Aniqa Khanom , Laurie Williams