Mitigating Persistence of Open-Source Vulnerabilities in Maven Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper investigates the widespread persistence of vulnerabilities in the Maven ecosystem, identifies causes such as upstream blocking, and proposes an automatic range restoration tool called Ranger to improve patch adoption and ecosystem security.

Contribution

It introduces Ranger, an automated solution for restoring dependency ranges, addressing ecosystem-wide vulnerability persistence by reducing manual effort and ensuring compatibility.

Findings

Ranger restored 75.64% of dependency ranges

Automatically remediated 90.32% of vulnerable projects

Identified upstream blocking as a key cause of vulnerability persistence

Abstract

Vulnerabilities from third-party libraries (TPLs) have been unveiled to threaten the Maven ecosystem. Despite patches being released promptly after vulnerabilities are disclosed, the libraries and applications in the community still use the vulnerable versions, which makes the vulnerabilities persistent in the Maven ecosystem (e.g., the notorious Log4Shell still greatly influences the Maven ecosystem nowadays from 2021). Both academic and industrial researchers have proposed user-oriented standards and solutions to address vulnerabilities, while such solutions fail to tackle the ecosystem-wide persistent vulnerabilities because it requires a collective effort from the community to timely adopt patches without introducing breaking issues. To seek an ecosystem-wide solution, we first carried out an empirical study to examine the prevalence of persistent vulnerabilities in the Maven ecosystem. Then, we identified affected libraries for alerts by implementing an algorithm monitoring downstream dependents of vulnerabilities based on an up-to-date dependency graph. Based on them, we further quantitatively revealed that patches blocked by upstream libraries caused the persistence of vulnerabilities. After reviewing the drawbacks of existing countermeasures, to address them, we proposed a solution for range restoration (Ranger) to automatically restore the compatible and secure version ranges of dependencies for downstream dependents. The automatic restoration requires no manual effort from the community, and the code-centric compatibility assurance ensures smooth upgrades to patched versions. Moreover, Ranger along with the ecosystem monitoring can timely alert developers of blocking libraries and suggest flexible version ranges to rapidly unblock patch versions. By evaluation, Ranger could restore 75.64% of ranges which automatically remediated 90.32% of vulnerable downstream projects.