Imranur Rahman

Imranur Rahman, Md Rayhanur Rahman

Code completion can help developers improve efficiency and ease the development lifecycle. Although code completion is available in modern integrated development environments (IDEs), research lacks in determining what makes a good context for code completion based on the information available to the IDEs for the large language models (LLMs) to perform better. In this paper, we describe an effective context collection strategy to assist the LLMs in performing better at code completion tasks. The key idea of our strategy is to preprocess the repository into smaller code chunks and later use syntactic and semantic similarity-based code chunk retrieval with relative positioning. We found that code chunking and relative positioning of the chunks in the final context improve the performance of code completion tasks.

Imranur Rahman, Jill Marley, William Enck et al.

Developers consistently use version constraints to specify acceptable versions of the dependencies for their project. \emph{Pinning} dependencies can reduce the likelihood of breaking changes, but comes with a cost of manually managing the replacement of outdated and vulnerable dependencies. On the other hand, \emph{floating} can be used to automatically get bug fixes and security fixes, but comes with the risk of breaking changes. Security practitioners advocate \emph{pinning} dependencies to prevent against software supply chain attacks, e.g., malicious package updates. However, since \emph{pinning} is the tightest version constraint, \emph{pinning} is the most likely to result in outdated dependencies. Nevertheless, how the likelihood of becoming outdated or vulnerable dependencies changes across version constraint types is unknown. The goal of this study is to aid developers in making an informed dependency version constraint choice by empirically evaluating the likelihood of dependencies becoming outdated or vulnerable across version constraint types at scale. In this study, we first identify the trends in dependency version constraint usage and the patterns of version constraint type changes made by developers in the npm, PyPI, and Cargo ecosystems. We then modeled the dependency state transitions using survival analysis and estimated how the likelihood of becoming outdated or vulnerable changes when using \emph{pinning} as opposed to the rest of the version constraint types. We observe that among outdated and vulnerable dependencies, the most commonly used version constraint type is \emph{floating-minor}, with \emph{pinning} being the next most common. We also find that \emph{floating-major} is the least likely to result in outdated and \emph{floating-minor} is the least likely to result in vulnerable dependencies.

Nusrat Zahan, Imranur Rahman, Laurie Williams

Practitioners often struggle with the overwhelming number of security practices outlined in cybersecurity frameworks for risk mitigation. Given the limited budget, time, and resources, practitioners want to prioritize the adoption of security practices based on empirical evidence. The goal of this study is to assist practitioners and policymakers in making informed decisions on which security practices to adopt by evaluating the relationship between software security practices adoption and security outcome metrics. To do this, we analyzed the adoption of security practices and their impact on security outcome metrics across 145K npm packages. We selected the OpenSSF Scorecard metrics to automatically measure the adoption of security practices in npm GitHub repositories. We also investigated project-level security outcome metrics: the number of open vulnerabilities (Vul_Count)), mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities in dependencies, and mean time to update (MTTU) dependencies. We conducted regression and causal analysis using 11 Scorecard metrics and the aggregated Scorecard score (computed by aggregating individual security practice scores) as predictors and Vul_Count), MTTR, and MTTU as target variables. Our findings reveal that aggregated adoption of security practices is associated with 5.2 fewer vulnerabilities, 216.8 days faster MTTR, and 52.3 days faster MTTU. Repository characteristics have an impact on security practice effectiveness: repositories with high security practice adoptions, especially those that are mature, actively maintained, large in size, have many contributors, few dependencies, and high download volumes, tend to exhibit better outcomes compared to smaller or inactive repositories.