Congying Xu

Zimo Ji, Congying Xu, Zongjie Li et al.

LLM coding agents increasingly rely on third-party agent skills from public marketplaces, which execute with the agent's privileges and create a software supply-chain attack surface: a malicious skill can steal credentials, exfiltrate source code, or install backdoors. Existing defenses use static skill scanners based on pattern matching or LLM-as-judge analysis, but it remains unclear whether they withstand adaptive evasions that preserve malicious behavior while changing payload appearance. This paper first presents an adversarial study of existing skill scanners through SkillCloak, a payload-preserving evasion framework that keeps the attack semantics intact while transforming their visible form. SkillCloak uses two complementary strategies: Structural Obfuscation, which rewrites visible payload indicators into semantically equivalent forms, and Self-Extracting Skill (SFS) Packing, which hides malicious components from the install-time view and restores them during agent execution. Across eight scanners and 1,613 in-the-wild malicious skills, SFS Packing bypasses every scanner at over 90%, while Structural Obfuscation bypasses over 80% on most static scanners and reaches 96% on a hybrid scanner, showing that appearance-based auditing is insufficient. Motivated by this finding, we propose SkillDetonate, a behavior-centric runtime auditor that executes skills in a sandbox and detects malicious effects through OS-boundary information-flow evidence rather than install-time appearance. SkillDetonate combines on-demand closure lift, which observes instructions materialized during execution, with marker-based taint analysis, which tracks sensitive-data flows across the agent context, files, processes, and network operations. The results show that SkillDetonate detects 97% of attacks at a 2% false-positive rate and sustains 87% detection on real-world malicious skills.

Congying Xu, Bihuan Chen, Chenhao Lu et al.

Open source software (OSS) vulnerabilities threaten the security of software systems that use OSS. Vulnerability databases provide valuable information (e.g., vulnerable version and patch) to mitigate OSS vulnerabilities. There arises a growing concern about the information quality of vulnerability databases. However, it is unclear what the quality of patches in existing vulnerability databases is; and existing manual or heuristic-based approaches for patch tracking are either too expensive or too specific to apply to all OSS vulnerabilities.

Ying Wang, Bihuan Chen, Kaifeng Huang et al.

Third-party libraries are a central building block to develop software systems. However, outdated third-party libraries are commonly used, and developers are usually less aware of the potential risks. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic study on usages, updates and risks of third-party libraries can provide practical insights to improve the ecosystem sustainably. In this paper, we conduct such a study in the Java ecosystem. Specifically, we conduct a library usage analysis (e.g., usage intensity and outdatedness) and a library update analysis (e.g., update intensity and delay) using 806 open-source projects. The two analyses aim to quantify usage and update practices holistically from the perspective of both open-source projects and third-party libraries. Then, we conduct a library risk analysis (e.g., potential risk and developer response) in terms of bugs with 15 popularly-used third-party libraries. This analysis aims to quantify the potential risk of using outdated libraries and the developer response to the risk. Our findings from the three analyses provide practical insights to developers and researchers on problems and potential solutions in maintaining third-party libraries (e.g., smart alerting and automated updating of outdated libraries). To demonstrate the usefulness of our findings, we propose a bug-driven alerting system for assisting developers to make confident decisions in updating third-party library versions. We have released our dataset to foster valuable applications and improve the ecosystem.

Kaifeng Huang, Bihuan Chen, Bowen Shi et al.

As a mixed result of intensive dependency on third-party libraries, flexible mechanism to declare dependencies, and increased number of modules in a project, multiple versions of the same third-party library are directly depended in different modules of a project. Such library version inconsistencies can increase dependency maintenance cost, or even lead to dependency conflicts when modules are inter-dependent. Although automated build tools (e.g., Maven's enforcer plugin) provide partial support to detect library version inconsistencies, they do not provide any support to harmonize inconsistent library versions. We first conduct a survey with 131 Java developers from GitHub to retrieve first-hand information about the root causes, detection methods, reasons for fixing or not fixing, fixing strategies, fixing efforts, and tool expectations on library version inconsistencies. Then, based on the insights from our survey, we propose LibHarmo, an interactive, effort-aware library version harmonization technique, to detect library version inconsistencies, interactively suggest a harmonized version with the least harmonization efforts based on library API usage analysis, and refactor build configuration files. LibHarmo is currently developed for Java Maven projects. Our experimental study on 443 highly-starred Java Maven projects from GitHub indicates that i) LibHarmo identifies 621 library version inconsistencies covering 152 (34.3%) of projects, and ii) the average harmonization efforts are that 1 and 12 library API calls are affected, respectively due to the deleted and changed library APIs in the harmonized version. 5 library version inconsistencies have been confirmed, and 1 of them has been already harmonized by developers.