Exploring the Relationship between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities: A Google Chrome Case

Abstract

Employing software metrics, such as size and complexity, for predicting defects has been given a lot of attention over the years and proven very useful. However, the few studies looking at software architecture and vulnerabilities are limited in scope and findings. We explore the relationship between software vulnerabilities and component metrics (like code churn and cyclomatic complexity), as well as architecture coupling metrics (direct, indirect, and cyclic coupling). Our case is based on the Google Chromium project, an open source project that has not been studied for this topic yet. Our findings show a strong relationship between vulnerabilities and both component level metrics and architecture coupling metrics. Unfortunately, the effects of different types of coupling are somewhat hard to distinguish.