LAGOON: An Analysis Tool for Open Source Communities

TL;DR

LAGOON is an open source platform that visualizes and analyzes open source communities using spatiotemporal graphs to identify malicious actors and understand community dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, extensible platform that integrates multiple data sources and machine learning for analyzing OSS communities, focusing on security and sociotechnical insights.

Findings

Supports ingestion from multiple data sources

Enables visualization of community interactions

Facilitates identification of bad actors

Abstract

This paper presents LAGOON -- an open source platform for understanding the complex ecosystems of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. The platform currently utilizes spatiotemporal graphs to store and investigate the artifacts produced by these communities, and help analysts identify bad actors who might compromise an OSS project's security. LAGOON provides ingest of artifacts from several common sources, including source code repositories, issue trackers, mailing lists and scraping content from project websites. Ingestion utilizes a modular architecture, which supports incremental updates from data sources and provides a generic identity fusion process that can recognize the same community members across disparate accounts. A user interface is provided for visualization and exploration of an OSS project's complete sociotechnical graph. Scripts are provided for applying machine learning to identify patterns within the data. While current focus is on the identification of bad actors in the Python community, the platform's reusability makes it easily extensible with new data and analyses, paving the way for LAGOON to become a comprehensive means of assessing various OSS-based projects and their communities.