Tracing known security vulnerabilities in software repositories–A Semantic Web enabled modeling approach

Abstract: The introduction of the Internet has revolutionized not only our society but also transformed the software industry, with knowledge and information sharing becoming a central part of software development processes. The resulting globalization of the software industry has not only increased software reuse, but also introduced new challenges. Among the challenges, arising from the knowledge sharing is Information Security, which has emerged to become a major threat to the software development community, since not only source code but also its vulnerabilities are shared across project boundaries. Developers are unaware of such security vulnerabilities in their projects, often until a vulnerability is either exploited by attackers or made publicly available by independent security advisory databases. In this research, we present a modeling approach, which takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies, to establish traceability links between security advisory repositories and other software repositories. More specifically, we establish a unified ontological representation, which supports bi-directional traceability links between knowledge captured in software build repositories and specialized vulnerability database. These repositories can be considered trusted information silos that are typically not directly linked to other resources, such as source code repositories containing the reported instances of these problems. The novelty of our approach is that it allows us to overcome some of these traditional information silos and transform them into information hubs, which promote sharing of knowledge across repository boundaries. We conducted several experiments to illustrate the applicability of our approach by tracing existing vulnerabilities to projects which might directly or indirectly be affected by vulnerabilities inherited from other projects and libraries.