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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 03 2020, @10:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the friend-of-a-friend dept.

More than 75% of all vulnerabilities reside in indirect dependencies:

The vast majority of security vulnerabilities in open-source projects reside in indirect dependencies rather than directly and first-hand loaded components.

"Aggregating the numbers from all ecosystems, we found more than three times as many vulnerabilities in indirect dependencies than we did direct dependencies," Alyssa Miller, Application Security Advocate at Snyk, told ZDNet in an interview discussing Snyk's State of Open Source Security for 2020 study.

The report looked at how vulnerabilities impacted the JavaScript (npm), Ruby (RubyGems), Java (MavenCentral), PHP (Packagist), and Python (PyPI) ecosystems.

Snyk said that 86% of the JavaScript security bugs, 81% of the Ruby bugs, and 74% of the Java ones impacted libraries that were dependencies of the primary components loaded inside a project.

[...] Snyk argues that companies scanning their primary dependencies for security issues without exploring their full dependency tree multiple levels down would release or end up running products that were vulnerable to unforeseen bugs.

So dear Soylentils, how do you track vulnerabilities in libraries that you use in your projects and do you scan beyond direct dependencies?

Previously:
(2020-05-16) Nine in Ten Biz Applications Harbor Out-of-Date, Unsupported, Insecure Open-Source Code, Study Shows


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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by hopdevil on Friday July 03 2020, @05:57PM

    by hopdevil (3356) on Friday July 03 2020, @05:57PM (#1015809)

    A vulnerability in a 3rd tier dependency does not immediately equate to a vulnerability in the application (or 2nd tier dependency for that matter). If you go into the analysis with that mindset, naturally you will find that a single vuln in a core library *may* affect many projects, but this is a meaningless metric. They basically measured how often core libraries are used and have an identified vulnerability.

    As a security researcher I'd rather look at code that is commonly used by everyone rather than a project that only has a dozen downloads.

    Don't version lock your code, fix how your code uses APIs that change over time and rebuild often.

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