Software Composition Analysis and Supply Chain Security in Apache Projects: an Empirical Study

A software supply chain consists of anything needed to develop and deliver a software project, including (third-party) components. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) allows for managing the security of software supply chains by identifying such components and their (security) vulnerabilities. The main goal of the empirical study presented in this paper is to investigate the effects of adopting/using over time an SCA tool like OWASP Dependency-Check (OWASP DC) in the context of the security of the software supply chain. To this end, following a cohort design, we analyzed the vulnerabilities affecting the components of the open-source (OS) Java Maven projects owned by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and publicly hosted on GitHub. These projects could adopt (or not) OWASP DC. The results indicate that the adoption of OWASP DC appears to be causing a significant reduction in the overall number/score of vulnerabilities, including those with a high Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) severity level. The use of OWASP DC also increased the vulnerabilities with a low severity level. Our results seem to encourage practitioners to adopt SCA to improve the security of their software supply chains.