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Provenance-Based Security Audits and Its Application to COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

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Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes (IPAW 2020, IPAW 2021)

Abstract

Software repositories contain information about source code, software development processes, and team interactions. We combine the provenance of development processes with code security analysis results to provide fast feedback on the software’s design and security issues. Results from queries of the provenance graph drives the security analysis, which are conducted on certain events—such as commits or pull requests by external contributors. We evaluate our method on Open Source projects that are developed under time pressure and use Germany’s COVID-19 contact tracing app ‘Corona-Warn-App’ as a case study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/corona-warn-app.

  3. 3.

    Data source: https://cauldron.io/project/3860.

  4. 4.

    All numbers are as of \(10^\mathrm{th}\) March, 2021.

  5. 5.

    GrimoireLab: http://chaoss.github.io/grimoirelab.

  6. 6.

    Cauldron: https://cauldron.io.

  7. 7.

    Spikes in the graphs during 08/20–09/20 are due to parallel branch development.

  8. 8.

    cf. https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/pull/876.

  9. 9.

    https://cwe.mitre.org/.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-server.

  11. 11.

    All numbers are as of \(10^\mathrm{th}\) March, 2021.

  12. 12.

    For example, https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-server/issues/269.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/PEPP-PT.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/DP-3T.

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Schreiber, A., Sonnekalb, T., Heinze, T.S., von Kurnatowski, L., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Packer, H. (2021). Provenance-Based Security Audits and Its Application to COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps. In: Glavic, B., Braganholo, V., Koop, D. (eds) Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes. IPAW IPAW 2020 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12839. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80960-7_6

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