On the Effort for Security Maintenance of Free and Open Source Components

The work presented in this paper is motivated by the need to estimate the security effort of maintaining Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) components within the software supply chain of a large international software vendor. We investigated publicly available factors (from number of active users to commits, from code size to usage of popular programming languages, etc.) to identify which ones impact three potential effort models: Centralized (the company checks each component and propagates changes to the product groups), Distributed (each product group is in charge of evaluating and fixing its consumed FOSS components), and Hybrid (seldom used components are checked individually by each development team, the rest is centralized). We use Grounded Theory to extract the factors from a six months study at the vendor. We report the results on a sample of 152 FOSS components used by the vendor.