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Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are complex software systems, made of thousands packages that evolve rapidly, independently, and without centralized coordination. During packages upgrades, corner case failures can be…
Due to their increasing complexity, today's software systems are frequently built by leveraging reusable code in the form of libraries and packages. Software ecosystems (e.g., npm) are the primary enablers of this code reuse, providing…
High Performance Computing~(HPC) software stacks have become complex, with the dependencies of some applications numbering in the hundreds. Packaging, distributing, and administering software stacks of that scale is a complex undertaking…
App repackaging refers to the practice of customizing an existing mobile app and redistributing it in the wild to fool the final user into installing the repackaged app instead of the original one. In this way, an attacker can embed…
Software has gained immense importance in our everyday lifeand is handling each and every aspect of today's technologicalworld. The idea of software at initial phase was implemented bya very precise minority of individual and now it's…
Software packages developed and distributed through package managers extensively depend on other packages. These dependencies are regularly updated, for example to add new features, resolve bugs or fix security issues. In order to take full…
Software systems have grown as an indispensable commodity used across various industries, and almost all essential services depend on them for effective operation. The software is no longer an independent or stand-alone piece of code…
ESCAPE is a free python package and framework for creating applications for simulating and fitting of X-ray and neutron scattering data with current support for specular reflectivity, polarized neutron reflectometry, high resolution X-ray…
Software modernization is an inherent activity of software engineering, as technology advances and systems inevitably become outdated. The term "software modernization" emerged as a research topic in the early 2000s, with a differentiation…
Package managers are a very important part of Linux distributions but we have noticed two weaknesses in them: They use pre-built packages that are not optimised for specific hardware and often they are too heavy for a specific need, or…
In recent years, fuzz testing has benefited from increased computational power and important algorithmic advances, leading to systems that have discovered many critical bugs and vulnerabilities in production software. Despite these…
"Evolution behaves like a tinkerer" (Francois Jacob, Science, 1977). Software systems provide a unique opportunity to understand biological processes using concepts from network theory. The Debian GNU/Linux operating system allows us to…
Computer systems have evolved over the years starting from sizable, single-user, slow, and expensive machines to multi-user, fast, cheaper, and small-sized machines. The use of multi-user computer networks has given rise to a new paradigm…
Software patching is a common method of removing vulnerabilities in software components to make IT systems more secure. However, there are many cases where software patching is not possible due to the critical nature of the application,…
Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages…
Rather than creating yet another network controller which provides a framework in a specific (potentially new) programming language and runs as a monolithic application, in this paper we extend an existing operating system and leverage its…
Recent developments in the commercial open source community have catalysed the use of Linux containers for scalable deployment of web-based applications to the cloud. Scientific software can be containerized with dependencies, configuration…
Software aging -- the phenomenon affecting many long-running systems, causing performance degradation or an increasing failure rate over mission time, and eventually leading to failure - is known to affect mobile devices and their operating…
From the Publisher:Software is a commodity being sold across diverse language and cultural groups, whether in the commercial marketplace, or as customized applications. Developers must structure their applications so that they can be…
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…