Characterizing usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in Java projects

doi:10.1007/s10664-022-10131-8

Characterizing usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in Java projects

2022-04-14

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DOI：10.1007/s10664-022-10131-8

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Third-party libraries are a key building block in software development as they allow developers to reuse common functionalities instead of reinventing the wheel. However, third-party libraries and client projects are developed and continuously evolving in an asynchronous way. As a result, outdated third-party libraries might be commonly used in client projects, while developers are unaware of the potential risk (e.g., security bugs) in usages. Outdated third-party libraries might be updated in client projects in a delayed way, while developers are less aware of the potential risk (e.g., API incompatibilities) in updates. Developers of third-party libraries may be unaware of how their third-party libraries are used or updated in client projects. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic study on usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in open-source projects can provide concrete evidence on these problems, and practical insights to improve the ecosystem sustainably. In this paper, we make the first contribution towards such a study in the Java ecosystem. First, using 806 open-source projects and 13,565 third-party libraries, we conduct a library usage analysis (e.g., usage intensity and usage outdatedness), followed by a library update analysis (e.g., update intensity and update delay). The two analyses aim to quantify usage and update practices from the two holistic perspectives of open-source projects and third-party libraries. Then, we carry out a library risk analysis (e.g., usage risk and update risk) on 806 open-source projects and 544 security bugs. This analysis aims to quantify the potential risk of using and updating outdated third-party libraries with respect to security bugs. Our findings suggest practical implications to developers and researchers on problems and potential solutions in maintaining third-party libraries (e.g., smart alerting and automated updating of outdated third-party libraries). To demonstrate the usefulness of our findings, we propose a security bug-driven alerting system, named LibSecurify, for assisting developers to make confident decisions by quantifying risks and effort when updating outdated third-party libraries. 33 open-source projects have confirmed the presence of security bugs after receiving our alerts, and 24 of those 33 have updated their third-party libraries. We have released our dataset to foster valuable applications and improve the Java third-party library ecosystem.

Keyword:

Library usages

Library updates

Library risks

Security bugs

Characterizing usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries in Java projects

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