GoSurf: Identifying Software Supply Chain Attack Vectors in Go
2024 (English)In: SCORED 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 Workshop on Software Supply Chain Offensive Research and Ecosystem Defenses, Co-Located with: CCS 2024, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2024, p. 33-42Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
In Go, the widespread adoption of open-source software has led to a flourishing ecosystem of third-party dependencies, which are often integrated into critical systems. However, the reuse of dependencies introduces significant supply chain security risks, as a single compromised package can have cascading impacts. Existing supply chain attack taxonomies overlook language-specific features that can be exploited by attackers to hide malicious code. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy of 12 distinct attack vectors tailored for the Go language and its package lifecycle. Our taxonomy identifies patterns in which language-specific Go features, intended for benign purposes, can be misused to propagate malicious code stealthily through supply chains. Additionally, we introduce GoSurf, a static analysis tool that analyzes the attack surface of Go packages according to our proposed taxonomy. We evaluate GoSurf on a corpus of 500 widely used, real-world Go packages. Our work provides preliminary insights for securing the open-source software supply chain within the Go ecosystem, allowing developers and security analysts to prioritize code audit efforts and uncover hidden malicious behaviors.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2024. p. 33-42
Keywords [en]
Golang, Open-Source Security, Supply Chain Attacks
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer Systems Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-358383DOI: 10.1145/3689944.3696166Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85214094051OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-358383DiVA, id: diva2:1927857
Conference
3rd Workshop on Software Supply Chain Offensive Research and Ecosystem Defenses, SCORED 2024, Salt Lake City, United States of America, Oct 14 2024 - Oct 18 2024
Funder
Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, CHAINS
Note
Part of ISBN 979-840071240-1
QC 20250117
2025-01-152025-01-152025-01-20Bibliographically approved