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(2020-05-16) Nine in Ten Biz Applications Harbor Out-of-Date, Unsupported, Insecure Open-Source Code, Study Shows
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @06:17PM
Yeah, this. It's been a while since I've looked into these things, but it seems like everybody's C library has its own way to handle strings to make up for C's issues. I bet there are hundreds of string libraries running on my machine, all accomplishing the same thing in subtly different ways.
People blame C for that, but I think it's human nature.
So you're going to solve this problem by rolling your own, eh?
You know what? The developers of the library you pulled in had the same problem. They solved it by rolling their own. Now their solution is your problem.
Aside from some dictator forcing us to use the One True Library for any given functionality, this doesn't seem like a problem that can be fixed, and I wouldn't want it to be fixed that way. The shark infested waters are where innovation happens. Some of it is just redundant; but some of it is progress. We're still in the early days of computing.