arXiv subjects

Elizabeth Lin

Publications and source records attributed to Elizabeth Lin.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Adoption to Deployment: A Qualitative Study on AI Integration in Software Development Practice

The increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as AI components in modern software systems introduces distinct security risks to the software supply chain. While many considerations and safety mechanisms are in place for components of the traditional software supply chain, the recent rapid adoption of AI components and platforms has overlooked these hard learned lessons. Selecting and integrating AI models without clear guidance on how these choices affect system security may leave applications vulnerable to threats, such as malicious components, data leakage, and unintended behavior. The goal of this study is to understand practitioners' decision making process and security considerations in selecting and integrating AI components through an exploratory semi-structured interview study. Toward this goal, we conducted semistructured interviews with 22 software developers, architects, and AI practitioners across diverse organizations about how they integrate AI components into their software. Our analysis finds that practitioners' model selection is predominantly driven by functional criteria, including performance, accuracy, cost, and specific features, e.g., tool calling or multimodal support, while security is rarely considered as an evaluation criterion. We observe a consistent lack of security concern throughout the AI component integration process, with established software supply chain lessons overlooked or ignored. The industry is repeating the historically costly mistakes of early software dependency management, prioritizing rapid reuse and availability over security and provenance. We distill our findings into actionable recommendations for AI adopters, model providers, and researchers, advocating for a proactive, security-by-design approach that integrates security evaluation into component selection and sustains it throughout the software development lifecycle.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Secure or Suspect? Investigating Package Hallucinations of Shell Command in Original and Quantized LLMs

Large Language Models for code (LLMs4Code) are increasingly used to generate software artifacts, including library and package recommendations in languages such as Go. However, recent evidence shows that LLMs frequently hallucinate package names or generate dependencies containing known security vulnerabilities, posing significant risks to developers and downstream software supply chains. At the same time, quantization has become a widely adopted technique to reduce inference cost and enable deployment of LLMs on resource-constrained environments. Despite its popularity, little is known about how quantization affects the correctness and security of LLM-generated software dependencies while generating shell commands for package installation. In this work, we conduct the first systematic empirical study of the impact of quantization on package hallucination and vulnerability risks in LLM-generated Go packages. We evaluate five Qwen model sizes under full-precision, 8-bit, and 4-bit quantization across three datasets (SO, MBPP, and paraphrase). Our results show that quantization substantially increases the package hallucination rate (PHR), with 4-bit models exhibiting the most severe degradation. We further find that even among the correctly generated packages, the vulnerability presence rate (VPR) rises as precision decreases, indicating elevated security risk in lower-precision models. Finally, our analysis of hallucinated outputs reveals that most fabricated packages resemble realistic URL-based Go module paths, such as most commonly malformed or non-existent GitHub and golang.org repositories, highlighting a systematic pattern in how LLMs hallucinate dependencies. Overall, our findings provide actionable insights into the reliability and security implications of deploying quantized LLMs for code generation and dependency recommendation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

S3C2 Summit 2025-03: Industry Secure Supply Chain Summit

Software supply chains, while providing immense economic and software development value, are only as strong as their weakest link. Over the past several years, there has been an exponential increase in cyberattacks specifically targeting vulnerable links in critical software supply chains. These attacks disrupt the day-to-day functioning and threaten the security of nearly everyone on the internet, from billion-dollar companies and government agencies to hobbyist open-source developers. The ever-evolving threat of software supply chain attacks has garnered interest from both the software industry and US government in improving software supply chain security. On Thursday, March 6th, 2025, four researchers from the NSF-backed Secure Software Supply Chain Center (S3C2) conducted a Secure Software Supply Chain Summit with a diverse set of 18 practitioners from 17 organizations. The goals of the Summit were: (1) to enable sharing between participants from different industries regarding practical experiences and challenges with software supply chain security; (2) to help form new collaborations; and (3) to learn about the challenges facing participants to inform our future research directions. The summit consisted of discussions of six topics relevant to the government agencies represented, including software bill of materials (SBOMs); compliance; malicious commits; build infrastructure; culture; and large language models (LLMs) and security. For each topic of discussion, we presented a list of questions to participants to spark conversation. In this report, we provide a summary of the summit. The open questions and challenges that remained after each topic are listed at the end of each topic's section, and the initial discussion questions for each topic are provided in the appendix.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

VFCFinder: Seamlessly Pairing Security Advisories and Patches

Security advisories are the primary channel of communication for discovered vulnerabilities in open-source software, but they often lack crucial information. Specifically, 63% of vulnerability database reports are missing their patch links, also referred to as vulnerability fixing commits (VFCs). This paper introduces VFCFinder, a tool that generates the top-five ranked set of VFCs for a given security advisory using Natural Language Programming Language (NL-PL) models. VFCFinder yields a 96.6% recall for finding the correct VFC within the Top-5 commits, and an 80.0% recall for the Top-1 ranked commit. VFCFinder generalizes to nine different programming languages and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 36 percentage points in terms of Top-1 recall. As a practical contribution, we used VFCFinder to backfill over 300 missing VFCs in the GitHub Security Advisory (GHSA) database. All of the VFCs were accepted and merged into the GHSA database. In addition to demonstrating a practical pairing of security advisories to VFCs, our general open-source implementation will allow vulnerability database maintainers to drastically improve data quality, supporting efforts to secure the software supply chain.

cs.CR↗