Lessons from the Long Tail: Analysing Unsafe Dependency Updates across Software Ecosystems
A risk in adopting third-party dependencies into an application is their potential to serve as a doorway for malicious code to be injected (most often unknowingly). While many initiatives from both industry and research communities focus on the most critical dependencies (i.e., those most depended upon within the ecosystem), little is known about whether the rest of the ecosystem suffers the same fate. Our vision is to promote and establish safer practises throughout the ecosystem. To motivate our vision, in this paper, we present preliminary data based on three representative samples from a population of 88,416 pull requests (PRs) and identify unsafe dependency updates (i.e., any pull request that risks being unsafe during runtime), which clearly shows that unsafe dependency updates are not limited to highly impactful libraries. To draw attention to the long tail, we propose a research agenda comprising six key research questions that further explore how to safeguard against these unsafe activities. This includes developing best practises to address unsafe dependency updates not only in top-tier libraries but throughout the entire ecosystem.
Tue 5 DecDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | Empirical Studies IIdeas, Visions and Reflections / Research Papers / Industry Papers / Journal First at Golden Gate A Chair(s): Cristian Cadar Imperial College London | ||
14:00 15mTalk | [Remote] Assess and Summarize: Improve Outage Understanding with Large Language Models Industry Papers Pengxiang Jin Nankai University, Shenglin Zhang Nankai University, Minghua Ma Microsoft Research, Haozhe Li Peking University, Yu Kang Microsoft Research, Liqun Li Microsoft Research, Yudong Liu Microsoft Research, Bo Qiao Microsoft Research, Chaoyun Zhang Microsoft, Pu Zhao Microsoft Research, Shilin He Microsoft Research, Federica Sarro University College London, Yingnong Dang Microsoft Azure, Saravan Rajmohan Microsoft 365, Qingwei Lin Microsoft, Dongmei Zhang Microsoft Research DOI Media Attached | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Open Source License Inconsistencies on GitHub Journal First Thomas Wolter Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg, Ann Barcomb Department of Electrical and Software Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Dirk Riehle U of Erlangen, Nikolay Harutyunyan Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Media Attached | ||
14:30 15mTalk | On the Relationship Between Code Verifiability and Understandability Research Papers Kobi Feldman College of William & Mary, Martin Kellogg New Jersey Institute of Technology, Oscar Chaparro William & Mary Media Attached | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Lessons from the Long Tail: Analysing Unsafe Dependency Updates across Software Ecosystems Ideas, Visions and Reflections Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Raula Gaikovina Kula Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, Kenichi Matsumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology Media Attached | ||
15:00 15mTalk | Towards Greener Yet Powerful Code Generation via Quantization: An Empirical Study Research Papers Xiaokai Wei AWS AI Labs, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla AWS AI Labs, Shiqi Wang AWS AI Labs, Wasi Ahmad AWS AI Labs, Baishakhi Ray Columbia University, Haifeng Qian AWS AI Labs, Xiaopeng LI AWS AI Labs, Varun Kumar AWS AI Labs, Zijian Wang AWS AI Labs, Yuchen Tian AWS, Qing Sun AWS AI Labs, Ben Athiwaratkun AWS AI Labs, Mingyue Shang AWS AI Labs, Murali Krishna Ramanathan AWS AI Labs, Parminder Bhatia AWS AI Labs, Bing Xiang AWS AI Labs Media Attached | ||
15:15 15mTalk | Understanding Hackers’ Work: An Empirical Study of Offensive Security Practitioners Industry Papers DOI Media Attached |