Fixing vulnerabilities potentially hinders maintainability

Fixing vulnerabilities potentially hinders maintainability

Reis, Sofia (University of Lisbon)
Abreu, Rui (Universidade do Porto)
Cruz, Luís (TU Delft Software Engineering)

2021

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability of their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates the impact of patches to improve security on the maintainability of open-source software. Maintainability is measured based on the Better Code Hub’s model of 10 guidelines on a dataset, including 1300 security-related commits. Results show evidence of a trade-off between security and maintainability for 41.90% of the cases, i.e., developers may hinder software maintainability. Our analysis shows that 38.29% of patches increased software complexity and 37.87% of patches increased the percentage of LOCs per unit. The implications of our study are that changes to codebases while patching vulnerabilities need to be performed with extra care; tools for patch risk assessment should be integrate into the CI/CD pipeline; computer science curricula needs to be updated; and, more secure programming languages are necessary.

Open-source software
Software maintenance
Software security

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d28d4950-654d-4e65-8896-3c98b2bfc2b5

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10019-z

1382-3256

Empirical Software Engineering, 26 (6)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 Sofia Reis, Rui Abreu, Luís Cruz