The talk discusses a highly scalable solution for fixing common security vulnerabilities in open source software through automated bulk pull request generation.
- Hundreds of thousands of human hours are invested every year in finding common security vulnerabilities with relatively simple fixes.
- Automated creation of thousands of bug reports by itself isn’t useful, & would be even more of a burden on volunteer maintainers of OSS projects.
- The solution is automated bulk pull request generation, which provides maintainers with information about the vulnerability and a fix in the form of an easily actionable pull request.
- The speaker generated over 150 pull requests to fix zip slip across the open source ecosystem, primarily in the Java ecosystem.
- Technologies like CodeQL and OpenRewrite are discussed as tools to aid in this process.