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Background: The Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem plays a vital role in modern software development by providing a vast repository of packages and tools that developers can use to implement their software systems. However, recent…
In modern software ecosystems, dependency management plays a critical role in ensuring secure and maintainable applications. However, understanding the relationship between release practices and their impact on vulnerabilities and update…
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…
Open-source libraries are widely used by software developers to speed up the development of products, however, they can introduce security vulnerabilities, leading to incidents like Log4Shell. With the expanding usage of open-source…
The popularity of JavaScript has lead to a large ecosystem of third-party packages available via the npm software package registry. The open nature of npm has boosted its growth, providing over 800,000 free and reusable software packages.…
Software ecosystems can be viewed as socio-technical networks consisting of technical components (software packages) and social components (communities of developers) that maintain the technical components. Ecosystems evolve over time…
An increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies. To assist these developers, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple technologies, i.e., a…
Modern software systems have transitioned from purely code-based architectures to AI-integrated systems where pre-trained models (PTMs) serve as permanent dependencies. However, while the evolution of traditional software libraries is…
Software ecosystems (e.g., npm, PyPI) are the backbone of modern software developments. Developers add new packages to ecosystems every day to solve new problems or provide alternative solutions, causing obsolete packages to decline in…
The robustness of npm dependency network is a crucial property, since many projects and web applications heavily rely on the functionalities of packages, especially popular ones that have many dependant packages. In the past, there have…
Dependency management in modern software development poses many challenges for developers who wish to stay up to date with the latest features and fixes whilst ensuring backwards compatibility. Project maintainers have opted for varied, and…
As the default package manager for Node.js, npm has become one of the largest package management systems in the world. To facilitate dependency management for developers, npm supports a special type of dependency, Peer Dependency, whose…
As modern software extensively uses free open source packages as dependencies, developers have to regularly pull in new third-party code through frequent updates. However, without a proper review of every incoming change, vulnerable and…
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…
An Operating System (OS) combines multiple interdependent software packages, which usually have their own independently developed architectures. When a multitude of independent packages are placed together in an OS, an implicit…
Modern programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Rust encourage software reuse by hosting diverse and fast-growing repositories of highly interdependent packages (i.e., reusable libraries) for their users. The standard way to…
The widespread of libraries within modern software ecosystems creates complex networks of dependencies. These dependencies are fragile to breakage, outdated, or redundancy, potentially leading to cascading issues in dependent libraries. One…
Python is widely used in the open-source community, largely owing to the extensive support from diverse third-party libraries within the PyPI ecosystem. Nevertheless, the utilization of third-party libraries can potentially lead to…
The NPM ecosystem has become a primary target for software supply chain attacks, yet existing detection tools are evaluated in isolation on incompatible datasets, making cross-tool comparison unreliable. We conduct a benchmark-driven…
The Log4j-Core vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, exposed significant challenges to dependency management in software ecosystems. When a critical vulnerability is disclosed, it is imperative that dependent packages quickly adopt patched…