Projection of Security Vulnerabilities caused by Exploits in Dependencies

ProSVED stands for Projection of Security Vulnerabilities caused by Exploits in Dependencies, and targets the prognosis of software vulnerabilities via security exploits in third-party libraries.

The code controlled by developers, e.g. to add security patches, is a small fraction of the whole codebase that supports any software project today. Most lines of code reside in external dependencies whose security vulnerabilities pose threats to the entire project. This can be mitigated via strategic update policies.

However, measuring the risks to find optimal policies constitutes a tremendous prognosis problem, to find the needle of offending lines that hide in a haystack of third-party libraries.

ProSVED proposes a novel rare-event approach to the challenge, to estimate the most promising update policies in order to reduce the security risks inherited from external code.

Working with experts from the University of Trento, ProSVED will thus push the frontiers of software security analysis, taking it beyond its classical empirical approach, and into the horizon of formal risk modelling for prediction and mitigation.