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arXiv · 2301.05097

Study of JavaScript Static Analysis Tools for Vulnerability Detection in Node.js Packages

Tiago Brito·Mafalda Ferreira·Miguel Monteiro·Pedro Lopes·Miguel Barros·José Fragoso Santos·Nuno Santos
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Abstract

With the emergence of the Node.js ecosystem, JavaScript has become a widely-used programming language for implementing server-side web applications. In this paper, we present the first empirical study of static code analysis tools for detecting vulnerabilities in Node.js code. To conduct a comprehensive tool evaluation, we created the largest known curated dataset of Node.js code vulnerabilities. We characterized and annotated a set of 957 vulnerabilities by analyzing information contained in npm advisory reports. We tested nine different tools and found that many important vulnerabilities appearing in the OWASP Top-10 are not detected by any tool. The three best performing tools combined only detect up to 57.6% of all vulnerabilities in the dataset, but at a very low precision of 0.11%. Our curated dataset offers a new benchmark to help characterize existing Node.js code vulnerabilities and foster the development of better vulnerability detection tools for Node.js code.

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Tiago Brito, Mafalda Ferreira, Miguel Monteiro, Pedro Lopes, Miguel Barros, José Fragoso Santos, Nuno Santos. 2023-01-12. Study of JavaScript Static Analysis Tools for Vulnerability Detection in Node.js Packages. https://doi.org/10.1109/tr.2023.3286301

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