70% of Mobile and Desktop Applications Contain Bugs.

Based on Veracode’s annual State of Software Security report 70 % of mobile and desktop apps contain open-source bugs. Analysis has examined more than 350 000 external libraries used in 81 000 applications and found that open-source libraries are commonly used.

These libraries may contain bugs and re-using the code developers are spreading these bugs.

According to Veracode: “It would be nearly impossible to innovate with software without these libraries. However, lack of awareness about where and how open source libraries are being used and their risk factors is a problematic practice.”

Based on the report the main libraries are Swift, .NET, Go and PHP. Swift has the highest level of flaws; .NET libraries has the lowest percentage of bugs. Go and PHP are in the middle between the first two.

Veracode also found that the most common vulnerability category is a cross-site scripting (XSS) – present in 30% of analysed libraries. Insecure deserialization stands after – 23.5 % and access control has 20.3 %.