An historical examination of open source releases and their vulnerabilities
Nigel Edwards, Liqun Chen · 2012
This paper examines historical releases of Sendmail, Postfix, Apache httpd and OpenSSL by using static source code analysis and the entry-rate in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures dictionary (CVE) for a release, which we take as a measure of the rate of discovery of exploitable bugs. We show that the change in number and density of issues reported by the source code analyzer is indicative of the change in rate of discovery of exploitable bugs for new releases --- formally we demonstrate a statistically significant correlation of moderate strength. The strength of the correlation is an artifact of other factors such as the degree of scrutiny: the number of security analysts investigating the software. This also demonstrates that static source code analysis can be used to make some assessment of risk even when constraints do not permit human review of the issues identified by the analysis.