Impact assessment for vulnerabilities in open-source software libraries

TL;DR

This paper presents a pragmatic, language-independent approach to assess the impact of vulnerabilities in open-source software libraries, aiming to streamline decision-making for application vendors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel impact assessment method that is independent of vulnerability types and programming languages, with a proof-of-concept implementation for Java.

Findings

Provides immediate impact assessment results

Applicable across different vulnerability types and languages

Demonstrated through a Java case study

Abstract

Software applications integrate more and more open-source software (OSS) to benefit from code reuse. As a drawback, each vulnerability discovered in bundled OSS potentially affects the application. Upon the disclosure of every new vulnerability, the application vendor has to decide whether it is exploitable in his particular usage context, hence, whether users require an urgent application patch containing a non-vulnerable version of the OSS. Current decision making is mostly based on high-level vulnerability descriptions and expert knowledge, thus, effort intense and error prone. This paper proposes a pragmatic approach to facilitate the impact assessment, describes a proof-of-concept for Java, and examines one example vulnerability as case study. The approach is independent from specific kinds of vulnerabilities or programming languages and can deliver immediate results.