On the Freshness of Pinned Dependencies in Maven

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22815v1
• Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2025 20:02:49 GMT
• Title: On the Freshness of Pinned Dependencies in Maven
• Authors: Vasudev Vikram, Yuvraj Agarwal, Rohan Padhye,
• Abstract summary: We show that over 60% of consumers of popular Maven libraries contain stale pins to their dependencies.<n>We prototype an approach called Pin-Freshener that can encourage developers to freshen their pins by leveraging crowdsourced tests of peer projects.<n>Our evaluation on real-world pins to the top 500 popular libraries in Maven shows that Pin-Freshener can provide an additional signal of at least 5 passing crowdsourced test suites.
• Score: 6.5131796406898745
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Library dependencies in software ecosystems play a crucial role in the development of software. As newer releases of these libraries are published, developers may opt to pin their dependencies to a particular version. While pinning may have benefits in ensuring reproducible builds and avoiding breaking changes, it bears larger risks in using outdated dependencies that may contain bugs and security vulnerabilities. To understand the frequency and consequences of dependency pinning, we first define the concepts of stale and fresh pins, which are distinguished based on how outdated the dependency is relative to the release date of the project. We conduct an empirical study to show that over 60% of consumers of popular Maven libraries contain stale pins to their dependencies, with some outdated versions over a year old. These pinned versions often miss out on security fixes; we find that 10% of all dependency upgrades in our dataset to the latest minor or patch version would reduce security vulnerabilities. We prototype an approach called Pin-Freshener that can encourage developers to freshen their pins by leveraging the insight that crowdsourced tests of peer projects can provide additional signal for the safety of an upgrade. Running Pin-Freshener on dependency upgrades shows that just 1-5 additional test suites can provide 35-100% more coverage of a dependency, compared to that of a single consumer test suite. Our evaluation on real-world pins to the top 500 popular libraries in Maven shows that Pin-Freshener can provide an additional signal of at least 5 passing crowdsourced test suites to over 3,000 consumers to safely perform an upgrade that reduces security vulnerabilities. Pin-Freshener can provide practical confidence to developers by offering additional signal beyond their own test suites, representing an improvement over current practices.

Related papers

• Analyzing the Availability of E-Mail Addresses for PyPI Libraries [89.21869606965578]
  81.6% of libraries include at least one valid e-mail address, with PyPI serving as the primary source.<n>We identify over 698,000 invalid entries, primarily due to missing fields.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-20T14:54:58Z)
• Maven-Lockfile: High Integrity Rebuild of Past Java Releases [8.004632448033531]
  Maven is one of the most important package managers in the Java ecosystem.<n>We present Maven-Lockfile to generate and update lockfiles with support for rebuilding projects from past versions.<n>Our evaluation shows that Maven-Lockfile can reproduce builds from historical commits and is able to detect tampered artifacts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-01T10:14:32Z)
• Faster Releases, Fewer Risks: A Study on Maven Artifact Vulnerabilities and Lifecycle Management [0.14999444543328289]
  We analyze the release histories of 10,000 Maven artifacts, covering over 203,000 releases and 1.7 million dependencies.<n>Our results show an inverse relationship between release speed and dependency outdatedness.<n>These findings emphasize the importance of accelerated release strategies in reducing security risks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-03-31T17:32:45Z)
• Discovery of Timeline and Crowd Reaction of Software Vulnerability Disclosures [47.435076500269545]
  Apache Log4J was found to be vulnerable to remote code execution attacks. More than 35,000 packages were forced to update their Log4J libraries with the latest version. It is practically reasonable for software developers to update their third-party libraries whenever the software vendors have released a vulnerable-free version.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-12T01:55:51Z)
• The Impact of SBOM Generators on Vulnerability Assessment in Python: A Comparison and a Novel Approach [56.4040698609393]
  Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has been promoted as a tool to increase transparency and verifiability in software composition. Current SBOM generation tools often suffer from inaccuracies in identifying components and dependencies. We propose PIP-sbom, a novel pip-inspired solution that addresses their shortcomings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-10T10:12:37Z)
• See to Believe: Using Visualization To Motivate Updating Third-party Dependencies [1.7914660044009358]
  Security vulnerabilities introduced by applications using third-party dependencies are on the increase. Developers are wary of library updates, even to fix vulnerabilities, citing that being unaware, or that the migration effort to update outweighs the decision. In this paper, we hypothesize that the dependency graph visualization (DGV) approach will motivate developers to update.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-15T03:57:27Z)
• Dependency Practices for Vulnerability Mitigation [4.710141711181836]
  We analyze more than 450 vulnerabilities in the npm ecosystem to understand why dependent packages remain vulnerable. We identify over 200,000 npm packages that are infected through their dependencies. We use 9 features to build a prediction model that identifies packages that quickly adopt the vulnerability fix and prevent further propagation of vulnerabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-11T19:48:46Z)
• On the Security Blind Spots of Software Composition Analysis [46.1389163921338]
  We present a novel approach to detect vulnerable clones in the Maven repository. We retrieve over 53k potential vulnerable clones from Maven Central. We detect 727 confirmed vulnerable clones and synthesize a testable proof-of-vulnerability project for each of those.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-08T20:14:46Z)
• Vulnerability Propagation in Package Managers Used in iOS Development [2.9280059958992286]
  Vulnerabilities may be found even in well-known libraries. The library dependency network in the Swift ecosystem encompasses libraries from CocoaPods, Carthage and Swift Package Manager. Although most libraries with publicly reported vulnerabilities are written in C, the highest impact of publicly reported vulnerabilities originated from libraries written in native iOS languages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-17T16:22:38Z)
• SequeL: A Continual Learning Library in PyTorch and JAX [50.33956216274694]
  SequeL is a library for Continual Learning that supports both PyTorch and JAX frameworks. It provides a unified interface for a wide range of Continual Learning algorithms, including regularization-based approaches, replay-based approaches, and hybrid approaches. We release SequeL as an open-source library, enabling researchers and developers to easily experiment and extend the library for their own purposes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-04-21T10:00:22Z)
• RoFL: Attestable Robustness for Secure Federated Learning [59.63865074749391]
  Federated Learning allows a large number of clients to train a joint model without the need to share their private data. To ensure the confidentiality of the client updates, Federated Learning systems employ secure aggregation. We present RoFL, a secure Federated Learning system that improves robustness against malicious clients.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-07T15:42:49Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.