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Evaluation of Open-Source IDE Plugins for Detecting Security Vulnerabilities

Published: 15 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Securing information systems has become a high priority as our reliance on them increases. Global multi-billion dollar companies have their critical information regularly exposed, costing them money and impairing their users' privacy. To defend against security breaches, IDE-integrated plugins to detect and remove security vulnerabilities in the first place are being used more frequently. More information about these plugins is needed in order to improve the state of the art within the field. Five open-source IDE plugins which can identify and report vulnerabilities are evaluated. We evaluate and compare how many categories of vulnerabilities the plugins can detect, how well the plugins detect the vulnerabilities, and how user-friendly the output of the plugin is to the developers. Our results show that certain vulnerabilities such as injection and broken access control are vastly covered by most plugins, while others have been completely ignored. A discrepancy between the claimed and actually confirmed coverage of the plugins is discovered, underlining the importance of this research. High false positive rate and obvious limitations in usability show that more work is needed before these plugins can be widely used and relied upon in a corporate setting.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
EASE '19: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
April 2019
345 pages
ISBN:9781450371452
DOI:10.1145/3319008
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • IT University of Copenhagen

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 15 April 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Software security
  2. integrated development environment
  3. plugin
  4. static analysis tools
  5. vulnerability detection

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EASE '19

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EASE '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 73 submissions, 27%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 71 of 232 submissions, 31%

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