The Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 resulted in a rapidly changing cyber threat environment globally and incentivized the sharing of security and privacy advice on social media. Previous research found a strong impact of online security advice on end-user behavior.

Open source components are ubiquitous in companies’ setups, processes, and software. Utilizing these external components as building blocks enables companies to leverage the benefits of open source software, allowing them to focus their efforts on features and faster delivery instead of writing their own components. But by introducing these components into their software stack, companies inherit unique security challenges and attack surfaces: including code from potentially unvetted contributors and obligations to assess and mitigate the impact of vulnerabilities in external components.In 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with software developers, architects, and engineers from industry projects, we investigate their projects’ processes, decisions, and considerations in the context of external open source code. We find that open source components play an important role in many of our participants’ projects, that most projects have some form of company policy or at least best practice for including external code, and that many developers wish for more developer-hours, dedicated teams, or tools to better audit included components. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for company stakeholders and the open source software ecosystem. Overall, we appeal to companies to not treat the open source ecosystem as a free (software) supply chain and instead to contribute towards the health and security of the overall software ecosystem they benefit from and are part of.

Open Source Software plays an important role in many software ecosystems. Whether in operating systems, network stacks, or as low-level system drivers, software we encounter daily is permeated with code contributions from open source projects. Decentralized development and open collaboration in open source projects introduce unique challenges: code submissions from unknown entities, limited personpower for commit or dependency reviews, and bringing new contributors up-to-date in projects’ best practices & processes.In 27 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with owners, maintainers, and contributors from a diverse set of open source projects, we investigate their security and trust practices. For this, we explore projects’ behind-the-scene processes, provided guidance & policies, as well as incident handling & encountered challenges. We find that our participants’ projects are highly diverse both in deployed security measures and trust processes, as well as their underlying motivations. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for the open source software ecosystem and how the research community can better support open source projects in trust and security considerations. Overall, we argue for supporting open source projects in ways that consider their individual strengths and limitations, especially in the case of smaller projects with low contributor numbers and limited access to resources.