Investigating the resolution of vulnerable dependencies with dependabot security updates

Abstract

Modern software development practices increasingly rely on third-party libraries due to the inherent benefits of reuse. However, libraries may contain security vulnerabilities that can propagate to the dependent applications. To counter this, maintainers of dependent projects should monitor their dependencies and security reports to ensure that only patched releases of the upstream applications are in use. As manual maintenance of dependencies has shown to be ineffective, several automated tools (aka bots) have been proposed to assist developers in rapidly identifying and resolving vulnerable dependencies. In this work, we focus on Dependabot, a popular bot providing security and version updates, and study developers’ receptivity to its security updates in engineered and actively maintained JavaScript projects. Moreover, we carry out a fine-grained analysis of the lifecycle of every vulnerability to manifest how they are dealt with in the presence of Dependabot. Our findings show that the task of fixing vulnerable dependencies is, to a large extent, delegated to Dependabot and that developers merge the majority of security updates within several days. On the other hand, when developers do not merge a security update, they usually address the identified vulnerability manually. This approach, however, often takes up to several months which in turn could expose the projects to security issues.