2021/06/06 by Sofia Reis, Reis, Sofia, Abreu, Rui +2
Computer Science · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Reliability and Analysis Research #Software System Performance and Reliability
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.03271
openalex publication_date 2021/06/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability of their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates the impact of patches to improve security on the maintainability of open-source software. Maintainability is measured based on the Better Code Hub's model of 10 guidelines on a dataset, including 1300 security-related commits. Results show evidence of a trade-off between security and maintainability for 41.90% of the cases, i.e., developers may hinder software maintainability. Our analysis shows that 38.29% of patches increased software complexity and 37.87% of patches increased the percentage of LOCs per unit. The implications of our study are that changes to codebases while patching vulnerabilities need to be performed with extra care; tools for patch risk assessment should be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline; computer science curricula needs to be updated; and, more secure programming languages are necessary.