SANER 2025
Tue 4 - Fri 7 March 2025 Montréal, Québec, Canada
Wed 5 Mar 2025 14:00 - 14:15 at L-1720 - API and Dependency Analysis (Room: L-1720) Chair(s): Raula Gaikovina Kula

The digital infrastructures supporting modern software have grown too complex to manage by hand. Therefore, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become a widely adopted practice to programmatically automate deploying such infrastructures. As infrastructure code may rely on third-party libraries and packages, understanding the software supply chains generated by these deployment dependencies is crucial to ensure reproducibility and security of software deployments. Nonetheless, deployment software supply chains remain an understudied topic. This paper aims to bridge this gap by first investigating which types of third-party software IaC may depend upon, then building an automated mechanism to identify such dependencies from infrastructure implementations. We focus our investigation on Ansible, one of the most popular IaC tools, and its plugins, which implement the interactions with the deployment platforms under configuration. From a manual analysis of 266 documented third-party requirements of Ansible plugins, we construct a taxonomy of 7 types of third-party software dependencies and their properties. We also found that a plugin’s dependencies are typically only described informally in the plugin’s documentation, which may be unstructured, incorrect, or incomplete, which encumbers the automatic generation of Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) for deployment code. Therefore, we design an automated Software Composition Analysis (SCA) that extracts these dependencies from an Ansible plugin’s implementation, leveraging 5 dependency implementation patterns identified in our manual analysis. This approach achieves a recall of 61%– 77% and a precision of 74%–95%. Finally, we apply the SCA in a large-scale quantitative experiment on 11,241 plugins, and find that 38% have third-party dependencies. The taxonomy presented in this paper can serve as a reference to design deployment SBOMs for these plugins, whereas our SCA forms a first step towards automatically generating such SBOMs.

Wed 5 Mar

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

14:00 - 15:30
API and Dependency Analysis (Room: L-1720)Research Papers at L-1720
Chair(s): Raula Gaikovina Kula Osaka University
14:00
15m
Talk
Analysing Software Supply Chains of Infrastructure as Code: Extraction of Ansible Plugin Dependencies
Research Papers
Ruben Opdebeeck Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bram Adams Queen's University, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pre-print
14:15
15m
Talk
Enhancing Automated Vulnerability Repair through Dependency Embedding and Pattern Store
Research Papers
Qingao Dong Beihang university, Yuanzhang Lin Beihang University, Xiang Gao Beihang University, Hailong Sun Beihang University
14:30
15m
Talk
Improving API Knowledge Comprehensibility: A Context-Dependent Entity Detection and Context Completion Approach using LLM
Research Papers
Zhang Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Xinjun Mao National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Kang Yang National University of Defense Technology, Tanghaoran Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Fei Gao National University of Defense Technology, Xunhui Zhang National University of Defense Technology, China
14:45
15m
Talk
Pay Your Attention on Lib! Android Third-Party Library Detection via Feature Language Model
Research Papers
Dahan Pan Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yi Xu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Runhan Feng Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Donghui Yu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jiawen Chen Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ya Fang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yuanyuan Zhang Shanghai Jiao Tong University
15:00
15m
Talk
THINK: Tackling API Hallucinations in LLMs via Injecting Knowledge
Research Papers
Jiaxin Liu National University of Defense Technology, Yating Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Deze Wang National University of Defense Technology, Yiwei Li National University of Defense Technology, Wei Dong National University of Defense Technology
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