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Context: GitHub hosts an impressive number of high-quality OSS projects. However, selecting "the right tool for the job" is a challenging task, because we do not have precise information about those high-quality projects. Objective: In this…
Large-scale software development has become a highly collaborative and geographically distributed endeavour, especially in open-source software development ecosystems and their associated developer communities. It has given rise to modern…
Many tools and libraries are readily available to build and operate distributed Web applications. While the setup of operational environments is comparatively easy, practice shows that their continuous secure operation is more difficult to…
Hardware security is an important concern of system security as vulnerabilities can arise from design errors introduced throughout the development lifecycle. Recent works have proposed techniques to detect hardware security bugs, such as…
Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is…
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…
The security of the Internet rests on a small number of open-source cryptographic libraries: a vulnerability in any one of them threatens to compromise a significant percentage of web traffic. Despite this potential for security impact, the…
Security is critical to the adoption of open source software (OSS), yet few automated solutions currently exist to help detect and prevent malicious contributions from infecting open source repositories. On GitHub, a primary host of OSS,…
Open Source Software (OSS) is a cornerstone of contemporary software development, yet the increasing prevalence of OSS project abandonment threatens global software supply chains. Although previous research has explored abandonment…
With the introduction of data protection regulations, the need for innovative privacy-preserving approaches to process and analyse sensitive data has become apparent. One approach is the Personal Health Train (PHT) that brings analysis code…
Code translation is crucial for cross-language codebase migration, and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising technique to automate this process. However, the security implications of using LLMs for code translation remain…
Reopened bugs can degrade the overall quality of a software system since they require unnecessary rework by developers. Moreover, reopened bugs also lead to a loss of trust in the end-users regarding the quality of the software. Thus,…
Along with the development of large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, many existing approaches and tools for software security are changing. It is, therefore, essential to understand how security-aware these models are and how these…
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that…
Malicious attacks on open-source software packages are a growing concern. The discovery of the XZ Utils backdoor intensified these concerns because of the potential widespread impact. This study, therefore, explores the challenges of…
Malicious URLs persistently threaten the cybersecurity ecosystem, by either deceiving users into divulging private data or distributing harmful payloads to infiltrate host systems. Gaining timely insights into the current state of this…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
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…
LLM-based coding agents are rapidly being deployed in software development, yet their safety implications remain poorly understood. These agents, while capable of accelerating software development, may exhibit unsafe behaviors during normal…
Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…