Biblio

A popular form of software reuse is the use of open source software libraries hosted on centralized code repositories, such as Maven or npm. Developers only need to declare dependencies to external libraries, and automated tools make them available to the workspace of the project. Recent incidents, such as the Equifax data breach and the leftpad package removal, demonstrate the difficulty in assessing the severity, impact and spread of bugs in dependency networks. While dependency checkers are being adapted as a counter measure, they only provide indicative information. To remedy this situation, we propose a fine-grained dependency network that goes beyond packages and into call graphs. The result is a versioned ecosystem-level call graph. In this paper, we outline the process to construct the proposed graph and present a preliminary evaluation of a security issue from a core package to an affected client application.

Clone-and-own approach is a natural way of source code reuse for software developers. To assess how known bugs and security vulnerabilities of a cloned component affect an application, developers and security analysts need to identify an original version of the component and understand how the cloned component is different from the original one. Although developers may record the original version information in a version control system and/or directory names, such information is often either unavailable or incomplete. In this research, we propose a code search method that takes as input a set of source files and extracts all the components including similar files from a software ecosystem (i.e., a collection of existing versions of software packages). Our method employs an efficient file similarity computation using b-bit minwise hashing technique. We use an aggregated file similarity for ranking components. To evaluate the effectiveness of this tool, we analyzed 75 cloned components in Firefox and Android source code. The tool took about two hours to report the original components from 10 million files in Debian GNU/Linux packages. Recall of the top-five components in the extracted lists is 0.907, while recall of a baseline using SHA-1 file hash is 0.773, according to the ground truth recorded in the source code repositories.