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Characterizing usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in Java projects

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Abstract

Third-party libraries are a key building block in software development as they allow developers to reuse common functionalities instead of reinventing the wheel. However, third-party libraries and client projects are developed and continuously evolving in an asynchronous way. As a result, outdated third-party libraries might be commonly used in client projects, while developers are unaware of the potential risk (e.g., security bugs) in usages. Outdated third-party libraries might be updated in client projects in a delayed way, while developers are less aware of the potential risk (e.g., API incompatibilities) in updates. Developers of third-party libraries may be unaware of how their third-party libraries are used or updated in client projects. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic study on usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in open-source projects can provide concrete evidence on these problems, and practical insights to improve the ecosystem sustainably. In this paper, we make the first contribution towards such a study in the Java ecosystem. First, using 806 open-source projects and 13,565 third-party libraries, we conduct a library usage analysis (e.g., usage intensity and usage outdatedness), followed by a library update analysis (e.g., update intensity and update delay). The two analyses aim to quantify usage and update practices from the two holistic perspectives of open-source projects and third-party libraries. Then, we carry out a library risk analysis (e.g., usage risk and update risk) on 806 open-source projects and 544 security bugs. This analysis aims to quantify the potential risk of using and updating outdated third-party libraries with respect to security bugs. Our findings suggest practical implications to developers and researchers on problems and potential solutions in maintaining third-party libraries (e.g., smart alerting and automated updating of outdated third-party libraries). To demonstrate the usefulness of our findings, we propose a security bug-driven alerting system, named LibSecurify, for assisting developers to make confident decisions by quantifying risks and effort when updating outdated third-party libraries. 33 open-source projects have confirmed the presence of security bugs after receiving our alerts, and 24 of those 33 have updated their third-party libraries. We have released our dataset to foster valuable applications and improve the Java third-party library ecosystem.

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Notes

  1. https://owasp.org/www-project-dependency-check/

  2. https://snyk.io

  3. https://dependabot.com

  4. https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc

  5. https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

  6. a.k.a. changing versions whose features are under active development but are allowed for developers to integrate before stable versions are released.

  7. The usage count can be obtained from the “Used by” field in the Maven central repository.

  8. https://www.blackducksoftware.com

  9. https://www.veracode.com

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61802067). Bihuan Chen is the corresponding author of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Fudan University, D2023, Interdisciplinary Building No. 2, Songhu Road No. 2005, Yangpu District, Shanghai, 201203, China

    Kaifeng Huang, Bihuan Chen, Congying Xu, Ying Wang, Bowen Shi, Xin Peng & Yijian Wu

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 02C-84, Block N4, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    Yang Liu

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  1. Kaifeng Huang
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Huang, K., Chen, B., Xu, C. et al. Characterizing usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in Java projects. Empir Software Eng 27, 90 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10131-8

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