[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.1145/2591062.2591200acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Characteristics of the vulnerable code changes identified through peer code review

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

To effectively utilize the efforts of scarce security experts, this study aims to provide empirical evidence about the characteristics of security vulnerabilities. Using a three-stage, manual analysis of peer code review data from 10 popular Open Source Software (OSS) projects, this study identified 413 potentially vulnerable code changes (VCC). Some key results include: 1) the most experienced contributors authored the majority of the VCCs, 2) while less experienced authors wrote fewer VCCs, their code changes were 1.5 to 24 times more likely to be vulnerable, 3) employees of the organization sponsoring the OSS projects are more likely to write VCCs.

References

[1]
Gerrit code review tool. https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/. {Online; accessed 6-Sep-2013}.
[2]
A. Austin and L. Williams. One technique is not enough: A comparison of vulnerability discovery techniques. In Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2011 International Symposium on, pages 97–106. IEEE, 2011.
[3]
A. Bosu and J. C. Carver. Peer code review in open source communities using reviewboard. In Proeedings of the 4th ACM Wksp. on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Language and Tools, pages 17–24, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.
[4]
A. Bosu and J. C. Carver. Peer code review to prevent security vulnerabilities: An empirical evaluation. In Software Security and Reliability-Companion (SERE-C), 2013 IEEE 7th International Conference on, pages 229–230, 2013.
[5]
T. Dyba, T. Dingsoyr, and G. K. Hanssen. Applying systematic reviews to diverse study types: An experience report. In First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2007. ESEM 2007., pages 225–234. IEEE, 2007.
[6]
I. Feinerer. Introduction to the tm package text mining in r. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ tm/index.html, 2013.
[7]
M. Gegick, P. Rotella, and L. Williams. Toward non-security failures as a predictor of security faults and failures. In Engineering Secure Software and Systems, pages 135–149. Springer, 2009.
[8]
M. Gegick, L. Williams, J. Osborne, and M. Vouk. Prioritizing software security fortification through code-level metrics. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Quality of protection, pages 31–38. ACM, 2008.
[9]
S. Lukins, N. Kraft, and L. Etzkorn. Source code retrieval for bug localization using latent dirichlet allocation. In 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2008. WCRE ’08., pages 155–164, 2008.
[10]
G. McGraw. Software security: building security in, volume 1. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006.
[11]
A. Meneely, H. Srinivasan, A. Musa, A. R. Tejeda, M. Mokary, and B. Spates. When a patch goes bad: Exploring the properties of vulnerability-contributing commits. page to appear, 2013.
[12]
A. Meneely and L. Williams. Secure open source collaboration: an empirical study of linus’ law. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pages 453–462. ACM, 2009.
[13]
Mitre Coroporation. Common weakness enumeration. http://cwe.mitre.org/. {Online; accessed 6-Sep-2013}.
[14]
M. Mukadam, C. Bird, and P. C. Rigby. Gerrit software code review data from android. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, pages 45–48. IEEE Press, 2013.
[15]
S. Neuhaus, T. Zimmermann, C. Holler, and A. Zeller. Predicting vulnerable software components. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pages 529–540. ACM, 2007.
[16]
OWASP. The open web application security project. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/ Category:Vulnerability, 2013. {Online; accessed 1-Sep-2013}.
[17]
Y. Shin, A. Meneely, L. Williams, and J. A. Osborne. Evaluating complexity, code churn, and developer activity metrics as indicators of software vulnerabilities. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 37(6):772–787, 2011.
[18]
Y. Shin and L. Williams. An empirical model to predict security vulnerabilities using code complexity metrics. In Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement, pages 315–317. ACM, 2008.
[19]
K. Tsipenyuk, B. Chess, and G. McGraw. Seven pernicious kingdoms: a taxonomy of software security errors. IEEE Security Privacy, 3(6):81 – 84, Nov.-Dec. 2005.
[20]
J. Walden, M. Doyle, G. A. Welch, and M. Whelan. Security of open source web applications. In Proceedings of the 2009 3rd international Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pages 545–553. IEEE Computer Society, 2009.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code SearchACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/360717932:6(1-79)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Empirical analysis of security-related code reviews in npm packagesJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111752203:COnline publication date: 13-Jul-2023
  • (2023)A Software Vulnerability Prediction Model Using Traceable Code Patterns and Software MetricsSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-02077-54:5Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Characteristics of the vulnerable code changes identified through peer code review

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSE Companion 2014: Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 2014
    741 pages
    ISBN:9781450327688
    DOI:10.1145/2591062
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    In-Cooperation

    • TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 31 May 2014

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. code review
    2. inspection
    3. open source
    4. security defects
    5. vulnerability

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    ICSE '14
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

    Upcoming Conference

    ICSE 2025

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)19
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
    Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code SearchACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/360717932:6(1-79)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Empirical analysis of security-related code reviews in npm packagesJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111752203:COnline publication date: 13-Jul-2023
    • (2023)A Software Vulnerability Prediction Model Using Traceable Code Patterns and Software MetricsSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-023-02077-54:5Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
    • (2023)An empirical analysis for software robustness vulnerability in terms of modularity qualitySystems Engineering10.1002/sys.2168626:6(754-769)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2023
    • (2021)Towards Automating Code Review ActivitiesProceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00027(163-174)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
    • (2021)Using code reviews to automatically configure static analysis toolsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10076-427:1Online publication date: 11-Dec-2021
    • (2020)The current practices of changing secure softwareProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3341105.3373922(1566-1575)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2020
    • (2019)Fixing of Security Vulnerabilities in Open Source Projects: A Case Study of Apache HTTP Server and Apache Tomcat2019 12th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST)10.1109/ICST.2019.00017(68-78)Online publication date: Apr-2019
    • (2017)Software Security in Open Source Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 21st Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT10.23919/FRUCT.2017.8250205(364-373)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2017
    • (2017)The Effect of Dimensionality Reduction on Software Vulnerability Prediction ModelsIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2016.263050366:1(17-37)Online publication date: Mar-2017
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media