Publications
Publications
- Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS)
Exploring the Relationship Between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities
By: Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Daniel J. Sturtevant and Lee Doolan
Abstract
Employing software metrics, such as size and complexity, for predicting defects has been given a lot of attention over the years and proven very useful. However, the few studies looking at software architecture and vulnerabilities are limited in scope and findings. We explore the relationship between software vulnerabilities and component metrics (like code churn and cyclomatic complexity), as well as architecture coupling metrics (direct, indirect, and cyclic coupling). Our case is based on the Google Chromium project, an open source project that has not been studied for this topic yet. Our findings show a strong relationship between vulnerabilities and both component level metrics and architecture coupling metrics. 68% of the files associated with a vulnerability are cyclically coupled, compared to 43% of the non-vulnerable files. Our best regression model is a combination of low commenting, high code churn, high direct fan-out within the main cyclic group, and high direct fan-in outside of the main cyclic group.
Keywords
Security Vulnerabilities; Software Architecture; Metrics; Software; Complexity; Measurement and Metrics
Citation
Lagerstrom, Robert, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Daniel J. Sturtevant, and Lee Doolan. "Exploring the Relationship Between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS) 9th (2017): 53–69. (Part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743.)
About The Authors
