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Q001 — Security Tool Adoption Rates in OSS CI Pipelines — Medium

Contents

Summary

Query: What fraction of open source projects on GitHub enforce comprehensive CI gate tooling — specifically static analysis (SAST), dependency/vulnerability scanning (SCA), container image scanning, strict type checking, and code coverage thresholds — as required checks on every commit or pull request? How does adoption vary by project size, programming language ecosystem, and whether the project is backed by a foundation or company versus community-maintained?

Bottom Line: Security tool adoption in open source CI is highly uneven: SCA (Dependabot) at ~69%, SAST (CodeQL) at 10-30%. Container scanning, type checking, and coverage threshold data are unmeasured. The primary adoption driver is platform integration/defaults, not security awareness. Comprehensive gate adoption (all categories simultaneously) is extremely rare and unquantified.

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

Searches

ID Target Returned Selected
S01 SAST tool adoption rates in open source CI pipelines 0 0
S02 SCA and dependency scanning adoption in open source 0 0
S03 Code coverage thresholds as CI gates in open source 0 0
S04 Adoption variation by project size, language, and governance 0 0
S05 SAST tool adoption rates in open source CI pipelines 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

  • [study] A comprehensive study measuring adoption of multiple security tool categories simultaneously in OSS CI is published
  • [organization] GitHub publishes official CodeQL or code scanning adoption statistics
  • [data_update] OpenSSF Security Baseline adoption statistics become available
  • [study] A mining study of container scanning tool presence in GitHub repositories is published
  • [time] 12 months after this research — the rapidly evolving GitHub Actions ecosystem warrants periodic remeasurement

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