1,720,954 research outputs found
Investigating the vulnerability fixing process in OSS projects: Peculiarities and challenges
No full textAlthough vulnerabilities can be considered and treated as bugs, they present numerous peculiarities compared to other types of bugs (canonical bugs in the remainder of the paper). A vulnerability adds functionality to a system, as it allows an adversary to misuse or abuse the system, while a canonical bug is an incomplete or incorrect implementation of a requirement, and thus degrades the functionality of the system. This difference can affect the fixing process of vulnerabilities. By mining the repositories of 6 open source projects, we characterize the differences in the fixing process between vulnerabilities and canonical bugs, highlighting critical issues which could represent challenges for future research. Results of our study demonstrate that: (i) more re-assignments (than the ones observed in canonical bugs) are required for finding the developers able to handle vulnerability-related bugs, (ii) developers’ security-related skills should be profiled, to improve the efficiency of the security bug assignment tasks, and, consequently, reduce the re-assignments, and (iii) vulnerabilities require more effort, contributors and time to define the fixing strategy but smaller time to fix than canonical bugs
Patchworking: Exploring the code changes induced by vulnerability fixing activities
No full textContext: Identifying and repairing vulnerable code is a critical software maintenance task. Change impact analysis plays an important role during software maintenance, as it helps software maintainers to figure out the potential effects of a change before it is applied. However, while the software engineering community has extensively studied techniques and tools for performing impact analysis of change requests, there are no approaches for estimating the impact when the change involves the resolution of a vulnerability bug. Objective: We hypothesize that similar vulnerabilities may present similar strategies for patching. More specifically, our work aims at understanding whether the class of the vulnerability to fix may determine the type of impact on the system to repair. Method: To verify our conjecture, in this paper, we examine 524 security patches applied to vulnerabilities belonging to ten different weakness categories and extracted from 98 different open-source projects written in Java. Results: We obtain empirical evidence that vulnerabilities of the same types are often resolved by applying similar code transformations, and, thus, produce almost the same impact on the codebase. Conclusion: On the one hand, our findings open the way to better management of software maintenance activities when dealing with software vulnerabilities. Indeed, vulnerability class information could be exploited to better predict how much code will be affected by the fixing, how the structural properties of the code (i.e., complexity, coupling, cohesion, size) will change, and the effort required for the fix. On the other hand, our results can be leveraged for improving automated strategies supporting developers when they have to deal with security flaws
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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