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Award ID contains: 1717022

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  1. ; ; ; ( , 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE))
    The large amount of third-party packages available in fast-moving software ecosystems, such as Node.js/npm, enables attackers to compromise applications by pushing malicious updates to their package dependencies. Studying the npm repository, we observed that many packages in the npm repository that are used in Node.js applications perform only simple computations and do not need access to filesystem or network APIs. This offers the opportunity to enforce least-privilege design per package, protecting applications and package dependencies from malicious updates. We propose a lightweight permission system that protects Node.js applications by enforcing package permissions at runtime. We discuss the design space of solutions and show that our system makes a large number of packages much harder to be exploited, almost for free. 
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  2. ; ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the Proc. International Conference on Software Engineering -- New Ideas Track (ICSE-NIER))
    With an increased level of automation provided by package managers, which sometimes allow updates to be installed automatically, malicious package updates are becoming a real threat in software ecosystems. To address this issue, we propose an approach based on anomaly detection, to identify suspicious updates based on security-relevant features that attackers could use in an attack. We evaluate our approach in the context of Node.js/npm ecosystem, to show its feasibility in terms of reduced review effort and the correct identification of a confirmed malicious update attack. Although we do not expect it to be a complete solution in isolation, we believe it is an important security building block for software ecosystems. 
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