Biblio

Github Gist is a service provided by Github which is used by developers to share code snippets. While sharing, developers may inadvertently introduce security smells in code snippets as well, such as hard-coded passwords. Security smells are recurrent coding patterns that are indicative of security weaknesses, which could potentially lead to security breaches. The goal of this paper is to help software practitioners avoid insecure coding practices through an empirical study of security smells in publicly-available GitHub Gists. Through static analysis, we found 13 types of security smells with 4,403 occurrences in 5,822 publicly-available Python Gists. 1,817 of those Gists, which is around 31%, have at least one security smell including 689 instances of hard-coded secrets. We also found no significance relation between the presence of these security smells and the reputation of the Gist author. Based on our findings, we advocate for increased awareness and rigorous code review efforts related to software security for Github Gists so that propagation of insecure coding practices are mitigated.

Practitioners use infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts to provision servers and development environments. While developing IaC scripts, practitioners may inadvertently introduce security smells. Security smells are recurring coding patterns that are indicative of security weakness and can potentially lead to security breaches. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners avoid insecure coding practices while developing infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts through an empirical study of security smells in IaC scripts. We apply qualitative analysis on 1,726 IaC scripts to identify seven security smells. Next, we implement and validate a static analysis tool called Security Linter for Infrastructure as Code scripts (SLIC) to identify the occurrence of each smell in 15,232 IaC scripts collected from 293 open source repositories. We identify 21,201 occurrences of security smells that include 1,326 occurrences of hard-coded passwords. We submitted bug reports for 1,000 randomly-selected security smell occurrences. We obtain 212 responses to these bug reports, of which 148 occurrences were accepted by the development teams to be fixed. We observe security smells can have a long lifetime, e.g., a hard-coded secret can persist for as long as 98 months, with a median lifetime of 20 months.