An Empirical Study on Reproducible Packaging in Open-Source Ecosystems
The integrity of software builds is fundamental to the security of the software supply chain. While Thompson first raised the potential for attacks on build infrastructure in 1984, limited attention has been given to build integrity in the past 40 years, enabling recent attacks on SolarWinds, event-stream, and xz. The best-known defense against build system attacks is creating \emph{reproducible builds}; however, achieving them can be complex for both technical and social reasons and thus is often viewed as impractical to obtain. In this paper, we analyze reproducibility of builds in a novel context: reusable \emph{components} distributed as \emph{packages} in six popular software ecosystems (npm, Maven, PyPI, Go, RubyGems, and Cargo). Our quantitative study on a representative sample of 4000 packages in each ecosystem raises concerns: Rates of reproducible builds vary widely between ecosystems, with some ecosystems having all packages reproducible whereas others have \issues in nearly every package. However, upon deeper investigation, we identified that with relatively straightforward infrastructure configuration and patching of build tools, we can achieve very high rates of reproducible builds in all studied ecosystems. We conclude that if the ecosystems adopt our suggestions, the build process of published packages can be independently confirmed for nearly all packages without individual developer actions, and doing so will prevent significant future software supply chain attacks.
Thu 1 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
14:00 - 15:30 | Analysis 3Research Track / Journal-first Papers at 212 Chair(s): Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Boosting Path-Sensitive Value Flow Analysis via Removal of Redundant Summaries Research Track Yongchao WANG Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yuandao Cai Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Charles Zhang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Pre-print | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Dockerfile Flakiness: Characterization and Repair Research Track Taha Shabani University of British Columbia, Noor Nashid University of British Columbia, Parsa Alian University of British Columbia, Ali Mesbah University of British Columbia Pre-print | ||
14:30 15mTalk | Evaluating Garbage Collection Performance Across Managed Language Runtimes Research Track Yicheng Wang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wensheng Dou Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yu Liang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yi Wang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wei Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Wei Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tao Huang Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Module-Aware Context Sensitive Pointer Analysis Research Track Haofeng Li SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, Chenghang Shi SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, Jie Lu SKLP, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, Lian Li Institute of Computing Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zixuan Zhao Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd File Attached | ||
15:00 15mTalk | An Empirical Study on Reproducible Packaging in Open-Source Ecosystems Research Track Giacomo Benedetti University of Genoa, Oreofe Solarin Case Western Reserve University, Courtney Miller Carnegie Mellon University, Greg Tystahl NCSU, William Enck North Carolina State University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University, Alexandros Kapravelos NCSU, Alessio Merlo CASD - School of Advanced Defense Studies, Luca Verderame University of Genoa | ||
15:15 15mTalk | T-Rec: Fine-Grained Language-Agnostic Program Reduction Guided by Lexical Syntax Journal-first Papers Zhenyang Xu University of Waterloo, Yongqiang Tian , Mengxiao Zhang , Jiarui Zhang University of Waterloo, Puzhuo Liu Ant Group & Tsinghua University, Yu Jiang Tsinghua University, Chengnian Sun University of Waterloo |