NDSS 2025 – Enhancing Security In Third-Party Library Reuse

Session 14A: Software Security: Applications & Policies

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Shangzhi Xu (The University of New South Wales), Jialiang Dong (The University of New South Wales), Weiting Cai (Delft University of Technology), Juanru Li (Feiyu Tech), Arash Shaghaghi (The University of New South Wales), Nan Sun (The University of New South Wales), Siqi Ma (The University of New South Wales)
PAPEREnhancing Security in Third-Party Library Reuse – Comprehensive Detection of 1-day Vulnerability through Code Patch Analysis
Nowadays, software development progresses rapidly to incorporate new features. To facilitate such growth and provide convenience for developers when creating and updating software, reusing open-source software (i.e., thirdparty library reuses) has become one of the most effective and efficient methods. Unfortunately, the practice of reusing third-party libraries (TPLs) can also introduce vulnerabilities (known as 1-day vulnerabilities) because of the low maintenance of TPLs, resulting in many vulnerable versions remaining in use. If the software incorporating these TPLs fails to detect the introduced vulnerabilities and leads to delayed updates, it will exacerbate the security risks. However, the complicated code dependencies and flexibility of TPL reuses make the detection of 1-day vulnerability a challenging task. To support developers in securely reusing TPLs during software development, we design and implement VULTURE, an effective and efficient detection tool, aiming at identifying 1-day vulnerabilities that arise from the reuse of vulnerable TPLs. It first executes a database creation method, TPLFILTER, which leverages the Large Language Model (LLM) to automatically build a unique database for the targeted platform. Instead of relying on code-level similarity comparison, VULTURE employs hashing-based comparison to explore the dependencies among the collected TPLs and identify the similarities between the TPLs and the target projects. Recognizing that developers have the flexibility to reuse TPLs exactly or in a custom manner, VULTURE separately conducts version-based comparison and chunk-based analysis to capture fine-grained semantic features at the function levels. We applied VULTURE to 10 real-world projects to assess its effectiveness and efficiency in detecting 1-day vulnerabilities. VULTURE successfully identified 175 vulnerabilities from 178 reused TPLs.
ABOUT NDSSThe Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations’ YouTube Channel.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosecurity.US authored by Marc Handelman. Read the original post at: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/MptkJKEQOdE?si=OYgMeEODSE8whqRO

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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