AssetHarvester: A Static Analysis Tool for Detecting Secret-Asset Pairs in Software Artifacts

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Basak, Setu Kumar, English, K. Virgil, Ogura, Ken, Kambara, Vitesh, Reaves, Bradley, Williams, Laurie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Basak, Setu Kumar
English, K. Virgil
Ogura, Ken
Kambara, Vitesh
Reaves, Bradley
Williams, Laurie
author_facet Basak, Setu Kumar
English, K. Virgil
Ogura, Ken
Kambara, Vitesh
Reaves, Bradley
Williams, Laurie
contents GitGuardian monitored secrets exposure in public GitHub repositories and reported that developers leaked over 12 million secrets (database and other credentials) in 2023, indicating a 113% surge from 2021. Despite the availability of secret detection tools, developers ignore the tools' reported warnings because of false positives (25%-99%). However, each secret protects assets of different values accessible through asset identifiers (a DNS name and a public or private IP address). The asset information for a secret can aid developers in filtering false positives and prioritizing secret removal from the source code. However, existing secret detection tools do not provide the asset information, thus presenting difficulty to developers in filtering secrets only by looking at the secret value or finding the assets manually for each reported secret. The goal of our study is to aid software practitioners in prioritizing secrets removal by providing the assets information protected by the secrets through our novel static analysis tool. We present AssetHarvester, a static analysis tool to detect secret-asset pairs in a repository. Since the location of the asset can be distant from where the secret is defined, we investigated secret-asset co-location patterns and found four patterns. To identify the secret-asset pairs of the four patterns, we utilized three approaches (pattern matching, data flow analysis, and fast-approximation heuristics). We curated a benchmark of 1,791 secret-asset pairs of four database types extracted from 188 public GitHub repositories to evaluate the performance of AssetHarvester. AssetHarvester demonstrates precision of (97%), recall (90%), and F1-score (94%) in detecting secret-asset pairs. Our findings indicate that data flow analysis employed in AssetHarvester detects secret-asset pairs with 0% false positives and aids in improving recall of secret detection tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_19072
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AssetHarvester: A Static Analysis Tool for Detecting Secret-Asset Pairs in Software Artifacts
Basak, Setu Kumar
English, K. Virgil
Ogura, Ken
Kambara, Vitesh
Reaves, Bradley
Williams, Laurie
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
GitGuardian monitored secrets exposure in public GitHub repositories and reported that developers leaked over 12 million secrets (database and other credentials) in 2023, indicating a 113% surge from 2021. Despite the availability of secret detection tools, developers ignore the tools' reported warnings because of false positives (25%-99%). However, each secret protects assets of different values accessible through asset identifiers (a DNS name and a public or private IP address). The asset information for a secret can aid developers in filtering false positives and prioritizing secret removal from the source code. However, existing secret detection tools do not provide the asset information, thus presenting difficulty to developers in filtering secrets only by looking at the secret value or finding the assets manually for each reported secret. The goal of our study is to aid software practitioners in prioritizing secrets removal by providing the assets information protected by the secrets through our novel static analysis tool. We present AssetHarvester, a static analysis tool to detect secret-asset pairs in a repository. Since the location of the asset can be distant from where the secret is defined, we investigated secret-asset co-location patterns and found four patterns. To identify the secret-asset pairs of the four patterns, we utilized three approaches (pattern matching, data flow analysis, and fast-approximation heuristics). We curated a benchmark of 1,791 secret-asset pairs of four database types extracted from 188 public GitHub repositories to evaluate the performance of AssetHarvester. AssetHarvester demonstrates precision of (97%), recall (90%), and F1-score (94%) in detecting secret-asset pairs. Our findings indicate that data flow analysis employed in AssetHarvester detects secret-asset pairs with 0% false positives and aids in improving recall of secret detection tools.
title AssetHarvester: A Static Analysis Tool for Detecting Secret-Asset Pairs in Software Artifacts
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19072