Contents
Summary
Claim: The average OpenSSF Scorecard score across the top one million critical open source projects is 5.4 out of 10.
Bottom Line: The 5.4 average Scorecard score is confirmed from Chainguard's analysis of 1,500 Wolfi upstream repos, not from OpenSSF's full 1 million critical projects. The 1 million project scanning program exists and publishes results to BigQuery. The 0-10 scoring methodology works as described. The specific 5.4 figure for the full population is unverified, though Chainguard notes that scores in the 4-6 range are 'typical' for open source projects. The popularity-score correlation suggests the critical projects set (selected for importance/popularity) might score higher than 5.4.
Results
| Artifact |
Description |
| Input |
Original text, clarification, scope, vocabulary |
| Assessment |
Evidence synthesis, probability assessment, gaps |
| Self-Audit |
Process audit across 4 ROBIS domains |
| Reading List |
Prioritized source list |
Hypotheses
| ID |
Label |
Status |
| H1 |
|
— |
| H2 |
|
— |
| H3 |
|
— |
Searches
| ID |
Target |
Returned |
Selected |
| S01 |
H1 |
0 |
0 |
| S02 |
H2 |
0 |
0 |
| S03 |
H2 |
0 |
0 |
| S04 |
H3 |
0 |
0 |
Sources
| ID |
Title |
Reliability |
Relevance |
| SRC001 |
https://arxiv.org/html/2602.14572v3 |
High |
High |
| SRC002 |
https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/wolfis-upstream-securit |
Medium |
High |
| SRC003 |
https://github.com/ossf/scorecard |
High |
High |
| SRC004 |
https://www.blackduck.com/blog/open-source-trends-ossra-repo |
Medium |
High |
| SRC005 |
https://www.scworld.com/news/open-source-vulnerabilities-per |
Medium |
High |
| SRC006 |
https://www.sonatype.com/state-of-the-software-supply-chain/ |
Medium |
High |
| SRC007 |
https://www.sonatype.com/state-of-the-software-supply-chain/ |
Medium |
High |
| SRC008 |
https://www.moderne.ai/blog/security-dependency-updates-unma |
Medium |
High |
| SRC009 |
https://konvu.com/compare/semgrep-vs-codeql |
Medium |
High |
| SRC010 |
https://arxiv.org/html/2605.07900v1 |
High |
High |
| SRC011 |
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.07669v2 |
High |
High |
| SRC012 |
https://openssf.org/blog/2024/01/31/maintainer-motivations-c |
High |
High |
| SRC013 |
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-023-10369-w |
High |
Medium |
Evidence Snapshot
| Dimension |
Rating |
| Evidence quality |
Medium |
| Source agreement |
Medium |
Revisit Triggers
- [organization] OpenSSF publishes aggregate Scorecard statistics (mean, median, distribution) for the 1 million critical projects
- [study] A researcher queries the BigQuery public dataset to compute the actual mean Scorecard score
- [policy] The Scorecard methodology changes significantly (new checks, different weighting)
- [data_update] Chainguard updates their Wolfi upstream analysis with a new average score
← Back to run overview