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Add marshall check for inactive maintainers #209

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lirantal opened this issue Jun 23, 2022 · 0 comments
Open

Add marshall check for inactive maintainers #209

lirantal opened this issue Jun 23, 2022 · 0 comments

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@lirantal
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lirantal commented Jun 23, 2022

Inactive Maintainers: We defined an inactive maintainer if the
maintainer had no active packages in the past two years. An at-
tacker can target packages with inactive maintainer(s) because any
attack will remain undetected due to the inactivity of maintainers.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10165.pdf

Further notes on how this was achieved through the research:

Analysis of npm packages: We extracted and stored the “time”
property of the package.json file to measure the number of pack-
ages that have been inactive for the past two years. We identified
inactive maintainers by evaluating the last modified time proper-
ties for all packages corresponding to an individual maintainer. A
package where none of the maintainers are active elsewhere in
the entire package registry is determined as inactive maintainers
of unmaintained packages. We also considered deprecated pack-
ages as unmaintained since they are unmaintained officially by the
maintainer. We separated the deprecated package where the last
modification time passed our threshold value because the depreca-
tion was declared later

Note: we could also link to this the inactive packages with a threshold of > 2 years since last version published

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