English
Related papers

Related papers: SourceBroken: A large-scale analysis on the (un)re…

200 papers

Industrial applications heavily rely on open-source software (OSS) libraries, which provide various benefits. But, they can also present a substantial risk if a vulnerability or attack arises and the community fails to promptly address the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Alexandros Tsakpinis , Alexander Pretschner

Package managers have become a vital part of the modern software development process. They allow developers to reuse third-party code, share their own code, minimize their codebase, and simplify the build process. However, recent reports…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Ruian Duan , Omar Alrawi , Ranjita Pai Kasturi , Ryan Elder , Brendan Saltaformaggio , Wenke Lee

Package confusion attacks such as typosquatting threaten software supply chains. Attackers make packages with names that syntactically or semantically resemble legitimate ones, tricking engineers into installing malware. While prior work…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Wenxin Jiang , Berk Çakar , Mikola Lysenko , James C. Davis

The exponential growth of open-source package ecosystems, particularly NPM and PyPI, has led to an alarming increase in software supply chain poisoning attacks. Existing static analysis methods struggle with high false positive rates and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Xinyi Zheng , Chen Wei , Shenao Wang , Yanjie Zhao , Peiming Gao , Yuanchao Zhang , Kailong Wang , Haoyu Wang

This paper examines software vulnerabilities in common Python packages used particularly for web development. The empirical dataset is based on the PyPI package repository and the so-called Safety DB used to track vulnerabilities in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Jukka Ruohonen

The increasing popularity of certain programming languages has spurred the creation of ecosystem-specific package repositories and package managers. Such repositories (e.g., npm, PyPI) serve as public databases that users can query to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Piergiorgio Ladisa , Merve Sahin , Serena Elisa Ponta , Marco Rosa , Matias Martinez , Olivier Barais

The open-source software (OSS) ecosystem suffers from security threats caused by malware.However, OSS malware research has three limitations: a lack of high-quality datasets, a lack of malware diversity, and a lack of attack campaign…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Xiaoyan Zhou , Ying Zhang , Wenjia Niu , Jiqiang Liu , Haining Wang , Qiang Li

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Yun Peng , Ruida Hu , Ruoke Wang , Cuiyun Gao , Shuqing Li , Michael R. Lyu

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

Accurately assessing software vulnerabilities is essential for effective prioritization and remediation. While various scoring systems exist to support this task, their differing goals, methodologies and outputs often lead to inconsistent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Viktoria Koscinski , Mark Nelson , Ahmet Okutan , Robert Falso , Mehdi Mirakhorli

In the rapidly evolving software development landscape, Python stands out for its simplicity, versatility, and extensive ecosystem. Python packages, as units of organization, reusability, and distribution, have become a pressing concern,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Haowei Quan , Junjie Wang , Xinzhe Li , Terry Yue Zhuo , Xiao Chen , Xiaoning Du

Open-source ecosystems such as NPM and PyPI are increasingly targeted by supply chain attacks, yet existing detection methods either depend on fragile handcrafted rules or data-driven features that fail to capture evolving attack semantics.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Wenbo Guo , Shiwen Song , Jiaxun Guo , Zhengzi Xu , Chengwei Liu , Haoran Ou , Mengmeng Ge , Yang Liu

Different security issues are a common problem for open source packages archived to and delivered through software ecosystems. These often manifest themselves as software weaknesses that may lead to concrete software vulnerabilities. This…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Jukka Ruohonen , Kalle Hjerppe , Kalle Rindell

Recently, the number of malicious open-source packages in package repositories has been increasing dramatically. While major security scanners focus on identifying known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in open-source packages,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Thanh-Cong Nguyen , Ngoc-Thanh Nguyen , Van-Giau Ung , Duc-Ly Vu

Language-based ecosystems (LBE), i.e., software ecosystems based on a single programming language, are very common. Examples include the npm ecosystem for JavaScript, and PyPI for Python. These environments encourage code reuse between…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-01 Ruturaj K. Vaidya , Lorenzo De Carli , Drew Davidson , Vaibhav Rastogi

Open-source software (OSS) has become increasingly more popular across different domains. However, this rapid development and widespread adoption come with a security cost. The growing complexity and openness of OSS ecosystems have led to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Seyed Ali Akhavani , Behzad Ousat , Amin Kharraz

In modern software development workflows, the open-source software supply chain contributes significantly to efficient and convenient engineering practices. With increasing system complexity, using open-source software as third-party…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Zihe Yan , Kai Luo , Haoyu Yang , Yang Yu , Zhuosheng Zhang , Guancheng Li

We consider the problem of identifying the provenance of free/open source software (FOSS) and specifically the need of identifying where reused source code has been copied from. We propose a lightweight approach to solve the problem based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Yiming Sun , Daniel M. German , Stefano Zacchiroli

Spracklen et al. (USENIX Security '25) showed that code-generating large language models hallucinate package names that do not exist on PyPI or npm at rates ranging from 5.2% on commercial models to 21.7% on open-source models, creating an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Aleksandr Churilov

In this research, we provide a comprehensive empirical summary of the Python Package Repository, PyPI, including both package metadata and source code covering 178,592 packages, 1,745,744 releases, 76,997 contributors, and 156,816,750…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-07-29 Ethan Bommarito , Michael Bommarito