TOP 文献データベース "I wasn't sure if this is indeed a security risk": Data-driven Understanding of Security Issue Reporting in GitHub Repositories of Open Source npm Packages
"I wasn't sure if this is indeed a security risk": Data-driven Understanding of Security Issue Reporting in GitHub Repositories of Open Source npm Packages
The npm (Node Package Manager) ecosystem is the most important package
manager for JavaScript development with millions of users. Consequently, a
plethora of earlier work investigated how vulnerability reporting, patch
propagation, and in general detection as well as resolution of security issues
in such ecosystems can be facilitated. However, understanding the ground
reality of security-related issue reporting by users (and bots) in npm-along
with the associated challenges has been relatively less explored at scale.
In this work, we bridge this gap by collecting 10,907,467 issues reported
across GitHub repositories of 45,466 diverse npm packages. We found that the
tags associated with these issues indicate the existence of only 0.13%
security-related issues. However, our approach of manual analysis followed by
developing high accuracy machine learning models identify 1,617,738
security-related issues which are not tagged as security-related (14.8% of all
issues) as well as 4,461,934 comments made on these issues. We found that the
bots which are in wide use today might not be sufficient for either detecting
or offering assistance. Furthermore, our analysis of user-developer interaction
data hints that many user-reported security issues might not be addressed by
developers-they are not tagged as security-related issues and might be closed
without valid justification. Consequently, a correlation analysis hints that
the developers quickly handle security issues with known solutions (e.g.,
corresponding to CVE). However, security issues without such known solutions
(even with reproducible code) might not be resolved. Our findings offer
actionable insights for improving security management in open-source
ecosystems, highlighting the need for smarter tools and better collaboration.
The data and code for this work is available at
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15614029