Open Access

AI-Assisted Dependency Vulnerability Resolution in Large-Scale Enterprise Systems

4 Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

Large-scale enterprise Java applications often rely on hundreds of third-party libraries. Over time, many of these libraries become outdated, vulnerable, or incompatible with newer environments. Manually managing these vulnerabilities is time-consuming, error-prone, and increasingly difficult as systems scale. This paper presents an AI-assisted approach to automate and prioritize the remediation of dependency vulnerabilities in enterprise systems. By integrating static dependency analysis, security advisories—including Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), which catalog publicly known software flaws—and machine learning models trained on historical resolution patterns, the system can recommend upgrade paths, detect potential breaking changes, and propose targeted refactoring strategies. We evaluate this framework on a real-world enterprise application with over 200 dependencies. Our approach achieves a 60% reduction in manual triage time and improves detection of latent security issues. Furthermore, integration with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, such as Jenkins, enables proactive and continuous monitoring of dependency health. These findings contribute to both the theory and practice of secure software maintenance in enterprise-scale Java systems.

Keywords

References

📄 Oracle. (2023). Java SE support roadmap. Oracle Corporation. https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roadmap.html
📄 OpenJDK. (2021). JEP 409: Sealed classes. https://openjdk.org/jeps/409
📄 Garcia, R., Patel, M., & Wong, T. (2021). Upgrading Java applications: A study on code changes and compatibility. Empirical Software Engineering, 26(5), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-09955-1 (if DOI available; otherwise omit)
📄 Harer, J., Kim, C., Russell, R., Ozdemir, O., & Stump, D. (2018). Learning to detect vulnerabilities with code-aware neural attention. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00613
📄 Li, Z., Zou, D., Xu, S., et al. (2018). VulDeePecker: A deep learning-based system for vulnerability detection. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2018/ndss-2018-programme/#vuldeepecker
📄 Wang, X., Liu, Y., Liu, Y., & Zhang, L. (2021). Detecting vulnerabilities in source code using deep representation learning. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 70(1), 248–263. https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2020.2977795 (if DOI available)
📄 Russell, R., Harer, J., Kim, C., & McConley, M. (2018). Automated vulnerability detection in source code using deep learning. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06680
📄 Imtiaz, A., Iqbal, A., & Mahmood, N. (2023). Evaluation of software composition analysis tools for open source software. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2478 (if DOI available)
📄 Palo Alto Networks. (2022). What is software composition analysis (SCA)? https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-software-composition-analysis-sca
📄 Scantist. (2023). Managing open source vulnerabilities effectively. https://scantist.com
📄 Snyk. (2023). State of open source security. https://snyk.io/state-of-open-source-security
📄 OWASP Foundation. (2023). Dependency-Check. https://owasp.org/www-project-dependency-check/
📄 Synopsys. (2022). Open source security risk report. Black Duck Software. https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/resources/analyst-reports/open-source-security-risk-report.html
📄 GitHub Security Lab. (2023). Advisory database. https://github.com/advisories
📄 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (2023). National vulnerability database. U.S. Department of Commerce. https://nvd.nist.gov/
📄 Sawant, M. R., & Harwade, P. S. (2021). A systematic literature review on vulnerability prediction using machine learning techniques. Journal of Information Security and Applications, 60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2021.102875 (if DOI available)
📄 Shivaji, S., Whitehead, E., & Akella, R. (2013). Predicting vulnerable software components using text mining. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 200–210). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606571 (if DOI available)
📄 Williams, L., Kessler, R., & Mockus, A. (2015). Vulnerability prediction models for enterprise software. Empirical Software Engineering, 20(2), 481–517. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-014-9315-8 (if DOI available)
📄 Ferrante, J., & Malaiya, K. (2015). Quantitative security risk assessment of software libraries. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 64(1), 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2014.2365931 (if DOI available)
📄 Checkmarx. (2023). Automated dependency scanning with AI [White paper]. https://checkmarx.com/resources

Most read articles by the same author(s)

Similar Articles

11-20 of 20

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.