An Analysis of Malicious Packages in Open-Source Software in the Wild

The open-source software (OSS) ecosystem suffers from security threats caused by malware. However, OSS malware research has three limitations: a lack of high-quality datasets, a lack of malware diversity, and a lack of attack campaign contexts. In this paper, we first build the largest dataset of 24,356 malicious packages from online sources, then propose a knowledge graph to represent the OSS malware corpus and conduct malware analysis in the wild. Our main findings include (1) it is essential to collect malicious packages from various online sources because their data overlapping degrees are small; (2) despite the sheer volume of malicious packages, many reuse similar code, leading to a low diversity of malware; (3) only 28 malicious packages were repeatedly hidden via dependency libraries of 1,354 malicious packages, and dependency-hidden malware has a shorter active time; (4) security reports are the only reliable source for disclosing the malware-based context.