{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dirty-waters-detecting-software-supply-chain","title":"Dirty-Waters: Detecting Software Supply Chain Smells","arxiv_id":"2410.16049","date":"2024-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Raphina Liu","Sofia Bobadilla","Benoit Baudry","Martin Monperrus"],"abstract":"Using open-source dependencies is essential in modern software development. However, this practice implies significant trust in third-party code, while there is little support for developers to assess this trust. As a consequence, attacks have been increasingly occurring through third-party dependencies. These are called software supply chain attacks. In this paper, we target the problem of projects that use dependencies while unaware of the potential risks posed by their software supply chain. We define the novel concept of software supply chain smell and present Dirty-Waters, a novel tool for detecting software supply chain smells. We evaluate Dirty-Waters on three JavaScript projects across nine versions and demonstrate the prevalence of all proposed software supply chain smells. Not only are there smells in all projects, but there are many of them, which immediately reveal potential risks and provide clear indicators for developers to act on the security of their supply chain.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16049v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16049v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dirty-waters-detecting-software-supply-chain","repo_url":"https://github.com/chains-project/dirty-waters","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}