Infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, such as Ansible scripts, are used to provision computing infrastructure at scale. Existence of bugs in IaC test scripts, such as, configuration and security bugs, can be consequential for the provisioned computing infrastructure. A characterization study of bugs in IaC test scripts is the first step to understand the quality concerns that arise during testing of IaC scripts, and also provide recommendations for practitioners on quality assurance. We conduct an empirical study with 4,831 Ansible test scripts mined from 104 open source software (OSS) repositories where we quantify bug frequency, and categorize bugs in test scripts. We further categorize testing patterns, i.e., recurring coding patterns in test scripts, which also correlate with appearance of bugs. From our empirical study, we observe 1.8% of 4,831 Ansible test scripts to include a bug, and 45.2% of the 104 repositories to contain at least one test script that includes bugs. We identify 7 categories of bugs, which includes security bugs and performance bugs that are related with metadata extraction. We also identify 3 testing patterns that correlate with appearance of bugs: 'assertion roulette’, 'local only testing’, and 'remote mystery guest‘. Based on our findings, we advocate for detection and mitigation of the 3 testing patterns as these patterns can have negative implications for troubleshooting failures, reproducible deployments of software, and provisioning of computing infrastructure.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2024
Detecting and Characterizing Propagation of Security Weaknesses in Puppet-based infrastructure Management
Despite being beneficial for managing computing infrastructure automatically, Puppet manifests are susceptible to security weaknesses, e.g., hard-coded secrets and use of weak cryptography algorithms. Adequate mitigation of security weaknesses in Puppet manifests is thus necessary to secure computing infrastructure that are managed with Puppet manifests. A characterization of how security weaknesses propagate and affect Puppet-based infrastructure management, can inform practitioners on the relevance of the detected security weaknesses, as well as help them take necessary actions for mitigation. We conduct an empirical study with 17,629 Puppet manifests with Taint Tracker for Pup pet Manifests ( TaintPup ). We observe 2.4 times more precision, and 1.8 times more F-measure for TaintPup, compared to that of a state-of-the-art security static analysis tool. From our empirical study, we observe security weaknesses to propagate into 4,457 resources, i.e, Puppet-specific code elements used to manage infrastructure. A single instance of a security weakness can propagate into as many as 35 distinct resources. We observe security weaknesses to propagate into 7 categories of resources, which include resources used to manage continuous integration servers and network controllers. According to our survey with 24 practitioners, propagation of security weaknesses into data storage-related resources is rated to have the most severe impact for Puppet-based infrastructure management.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10424781
- Editor(s):
- Sebastian Uchitel
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0098-5589
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 18
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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