Detecting Insecure Software Updates at Scale with LLM Agents

TL;DR

• I used a hierarchy of low-cost source-reading agents, stronger review agents, and manual verification to trace how 3,006 open-source projects handle software updates.
• I found 624 with an updater that could download and then install, load, or execute code: 134 used a pinned signing key, 109 enforced a publisher identity, 332 relied only on HTTPS, and 49 used broken transport security. The other 2,382 had no updater or were notification-only.
• In those 49 projects, a man-in-the-middle attacker could replace update payloads and achieve remote code execution on users’ machines.

Browse the dataset or inspect and correct it in the public repository.