Enterprise-Driven Open Source Software: A Case Study on Security Automation

TL;DR

This study investigates the limited use of automated security activities in CI pipelines of enterprise-driven open source software, highlighting gaps between perceived importance and actual implementation.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on security automation in OSS CI pipelines and offers insights into current practices and areas for improvement.

Findings

Only 6.83% of projects use security automation in CI pipelines

Security activities are scarce despite their perceived importance

The study offers recommendations for enhancing security practices in OSS

Abstract

Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators' demands early. In this paper, we analyze automated security activities in CI pipelines of enterprise-driven open source software (OSS). This shall allow us, in the long-run, to better understand the extent to which security activities are (or should be) part of automated pipelines. In particular, we mine publicly available OSS repositories and survey a sample of project maintainers to better understand the role that security activities and their related tools play in their CI pipelines. To increase transparency and allow other researchers to replicate our study (and to take different perspectives), we further disclose our research artefacts. Our results indicate that security activities in enterprise-driven OSS projects are scarce and protection coverage is rather low. Only 6.83% of the analyzed 8,243 projects apply security automation in their CI pipelines, even though maintainers consider security to be rather important. This alerts industry to keep the focus on vulnerabilities of 3rd Party software and it opens space for other improvements of practice which we outline in this manuscript.