Papers › Tracing Vulnerable Code Lineage

Tracing Vulnerable Code Lineage

23 Mar 2021arXiv:2103.12304links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

David Reid, Kalvin Eng, Chris Bogart, Adam Tutko

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This paper presents results from the MSR 2021 Hackathon. Our team investigates files/projects that contain known security vulnerabilities and how widespread they are throughout repositories in open source software. These security vulnerabilities can potentially be propagated through code reuse even when the vulnerability is fixed in different versions of the code. We utilize the World of Code infrastructure to discover file-level duplication of code from a nearly complete collection of open source software. This paper describes a method and set of tools to find all open source projects that use known vulnerable files and any previous revisions of those files.

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