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Security advisories are the primary channel of communication for discovered vulnerabilities in open-source software, but they often lack crucial information. Specifically, 63% of vulnerability database reports are missing their patch links, also referred to as vulnerability fixing commits (VFCs). This paper introduces VFCFinder, a tool that generates the top-five ranked set of VFCs for a given security advisory using Natural Language Programming Language (NL-PL) models. VFCFinder yields a 96.6% recall for finding the correct VFC within the Top-5 commits, and an 80.0% recall for the Top-1 ranked commit. VFCFinder generalizes to nine different programming languages and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 36 percentage points in terms of Top-1 recall. As a practical contribution, we used VFCFinder to backfill over 300 missing VFCs in the GitHub Security Advisory (GHSA) database. All of the VFCs were accepted and merged into the GHSA database. In addition to demonstrating a practical pairing of security advisories to VFCs, our general open-source implementation will allow vulnerability database maintainers to drastically improve data quality, supporting efforts to secure the software supply chain.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2025
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With the rise in threats against the software supply chain, developer integrated development environments (IDEs) present an attractive target for attackers. For example, researchers have found extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that start web servers and can be exploited via JavaScript executing in a web browser on the developer's host. This paper seeks to systematically understand the landscape of vulnerabilities in VS Code's extension marketplace. We identify a set of four sources of untrusted input and three code targets that can be used for code injection and file integrity attacks and use them to design taint analysis rules in CodeQL. We then perform an ecosystem-level analysis of the VS Code extension marketplace, studying 25,402 extensions that contain code. Our results show that while vulnerabilities are not pervasive, they exist and impact millions of users. Specifically, we find 21 extensions with verified proof of concept exploits of code injection attacks impacting a total of over 6 million installations. Through this study, we demonstrate the need for greater attention to the security of IDE extensions.more » « less