A Large-scale Fine-grained Analysis of Packages in Open-Source Software Ecosystems
<|reference_start|>A Large-scale Fine-grained Analysis of Packages in Open-Source Software Ecosystems: Package managers such as NPM, Maven, and PyPI play a pivotal role in open-source software (OSS) ecosystems, streamlining the distribution and management of various freely available packages. The fine-grained details within software packages can unveil potential risks within existing OSS ecosystems, offering valuable insights for detecting malicious packages. In this study, we undertake a large-scale empirical analysis focusing on fine-grained information (FGI): the metadata, static, and dynamic functions. Specifically, we investigate the FGI usage across a diverse set of 50,000+ legitimate and 1,000+ malicious packages. Based on this diverse data collection, we conducted a comparative analysis between legitimate and malicious packages. Our findings reveal that (1) malicious packages have less metadata content and utilize fewer static and dynamic functions than legitimate ones; (2) malicious packages demonstrate a higher tendency to invoke HTTP/URL functions as opposed to other application services, such as FTP or SMTP; (3) FGI serves as a distinguishable indicator between legitimate and malicious packages; and (4) one dimension in FGI has sufficient distinguishable capability to detect malicious packages, and combining all dimensions in FGI cannot significantly improve overall performance.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhou2024a,
    title={A Large-scale Fine-grained Analysis of Packages in Open-Source Software
  Ecosystems},
    author={Xiaoyan Zhou, Feiran Liang, Zhaojie Xie, Yang Lan, Wenjia Niu, Jiqiang
  Liu, Haining Wang and Qiang Li},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.11467},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.11467},
    primaryClass={cs.SE cs.CR}
}