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On the impact of security vulnerabilities in the npm and RubyGems dependency networks

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Abstract

The increasing interest in open source software has led to the emergence of large language-specific package distributions of reusable software libraries, such as npm and RubyGems. These software packages can be subject to vulnerabilities that may expose dependent packages through explicitly declared dependencies. Using Snyk’s vulnerability database, this article empirically studies vulnerabilities affecting npm and RubyGems packages. We analyse how and when these vulnerabilities are disclosed and fixed, and how their prevalence changes over time. We also analyse how vulnerable packages expose their direct and indirect dependents to vulnerabilities. We distinguish between two types of dependents: packages distributed via the package manager, and external GitHub projects depending on npm packages. We observe that the number of vulnerabilities in npm is increasing and being disclosed faster than vulnerabilities in RubyGems. For both package distributions, the time required to disclose vulnerabilities is increasing over time. Vulnerabilities in npm packages affect a median of 30 package releases, while this is 59 releases in RubyGems packages. A large proportion of external GitHub projects is exposed to vulnerabilities coming from direct or indirect dependencies. 33% and 40% of dependency vulnerabilities to which projects and packages are exposed, respectively, have their fixes in more recent releases within the same major release range of the used dependency. Our findings reveal that more effort is needed to better secure open source package distributions.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

  2. See https://semver.org

  3. https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/package.json

  4. https://www.npmjs.com/package/mocha

  5. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/Gemfile

  6. https://rubygems.org/gems/json

  7. https://github.com/left-pad/left-pad/issues/4

  8. https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/26/npm_repo_bitcoin_stealer/

  9. cve.mitre.org

  10. https://snyk.io/vuln

  11. https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-RUBY-RESTCLIENT-459900

  12. If n different tests are carried out over the same dataset, for each individual test one can only reject H0 if \(p< \frac {0.05}{n}\). In our case n = 48, i.e., p < 0.001.

  13. https://github.com/AhmedZerouali/vulnerability_analysis

  14. R2 ∈ [0, 1] and the closer to 1 the better the model fits the data.

  15. According to libraries.io, in May 2021, npm contained 1.79M packages compared to “only” 173K packages in RubyGems.

  16. https://snyk.io/vuln/SNYK-DEBIAN9-SUDO-1065095

  17. https://cve.mitre.org/cve/request_id.html

  18. We implicitly assume here that the first unaffected release is the one containing the fix.

  19. This analysis included Malicious Package vulnerabilities

  20. The two categories of directly and indirectly exposed package releases are non-exclusive.

  21. The two categories of directly and indirectly exposed projects are non-exclusive.

  22. Top-level packages are packages that do not have any dependent packages themselves.

  23. https://www.npmjs.com/package/sql

  24. https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash

  25. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2019-10744

  26. https://dependabot.com/

  27. https://nvd.nist.gov/

  28. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2019-10744

  29. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/commands/npm-dedupe

  30. https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/resources/blog/prototype-pollution-vulnerabilities/

  31. https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60fec610

  32. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/configuring-npm/package-lock-json

  33. https://bundler.io/rationale.html

  34. https://libraries.io/search?q=wowdude

  35. https://libraries.io/npm/neat-106

  36. https://nvd.nist.gov/

  37. https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:wysihtml:20121229

  38. https://www.npmjs.com/package/wysihtml

  39. https://github.com/Voog/wysihtml/tags?after=0.4.0

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially funded by the Excellence of Science project 30446992 SECO-Assist financed by F.R.S.-FNRS and FWO-Vlaanderen, as well as FNRS Research Credit J015120 and FNRS Research Project T001718. We express our gratitude to the security team of Snyk for granting us permission to use their dataset of vulnerability reports for research purposes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Ahmed Zerouali & Coen De Roover

  2. Université de Mons, Mons, Belgium

    Tom Mens & Alexandre Decan

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  1. Ahmed Zerouali
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  2. Tom Mens
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Correspondence to Ahmed Zerouali.

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Communicated by: Jeffrey C. Carver

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Zerouali, A., Mens, T., Decan, A. et al. On the impact of security vulnerabilities in the npm and RubyGems dependency networks. Empir Software Eng 27, 107 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10154-1

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