Markus Voggenreiter

Phillip Schneider, Markus Voggenreiter, Abdullah Gulraiz et al.

Over the last years, software development in domains with high security demands transitioned from traditional methodologies to uniting modern approaches from software development and operations (DevOps). Key principles of DevOps gained more importance and are now applied to security aspects of software development, resulting in the automation of security-enhancing activities. In particular, it is common practice to use automated security testing tools that generate reports after inspecting a software artifact from multiple perspectives. However, this raises the challenge of generating duplicate security findings. To identify these duplicate findings manually, a security expert has to invest resources like time, effort, and knowledge. A partial automation of this process could reduce the analysis effort, encourage DevOps principles, and diminish the chance of human error. In this study, we investigated the potential of applying Natural Language Processing for clustering semantically similar security findings to support the identification of problem-specific duplicate findings. Towards this goal, we developed a web application for annotating and assessing security testing tool reports and published a human-annotated corpus of clustered security findings. In addition, we performed a comparison of different semantic similarity techniques for automatically grouping security findings. Finally, we assess the resulting clusters using both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods.

Florian Angermeir, Markus Voggenreiter, Fabiola Moyón et al.

Agile and DevOps are widely adopted by the industry. Hence, integrating security activities with industrial practices, such as continuous integration (CI) pipelines, is necessary to detect security flaws and adhere to regulators' demands early. In this paper, we analyze automated security activities in CI pipelines of enterprise-driven open source software (OSS). This shall allow us, in the long-run, to better understand the extent to which security activities are (or should be) part of automated pipelines. In particular, we mine publicly available OSS repositories and survey a sample of project maintainers to better understand the role that security activities and their related tools play in their CI pipelines. To increase transparency and allow other researchers to replicate our study (and to take different perspectives), we further disclose our research artefacts. Our results indicate that security activities in enterprise-driven OSS projects are scarce and protection coverage is rather low. Only 6.83% of the analyzed 8,243 projects apply security automation in their CI pipelines, even though maintainers consider security to be rather important. This alerts industry to keep the focus on vulnerabilities of 3rd Party software and it opens space for other improvements of practice which we outline in this manuscript.