Software Ecosystem Call Graph for Dependency Management

Software Ecosystem Call Graph for Dependency Management

Hejderup, J.I. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology)
Gousios, G. (TU Delft Software Engineering)

Software Technology

2018

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.

dependency management
software ecosystem
dependencies
call graph
program analysis

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6f088b70-bccb-476e-b092-395078dec39b

https://doi.org/10.1145/3183399.3183417

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY

978-1-4503-5662-6

ICSE-NIER'18 Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results Track

ICSE 2018, 2018-05-27 → 2018-06-03, Gothenburg, Sweden

R2 - Software Engineering in Other Domains Accepted author manuscript

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 J.I. Hejderup, A. van Deursen, G. Gousios