PatchRisk: Forecasting Future Vulnerability Exposure in Open-Source Dependency Networks

Abstract

Open-source software ecosystems are web-scale dependency networks. A downstream package can become exposed to security risk not because its own source code changes, but because one of its transitive dependencies later receives a vulnerability advisory. Existing vulnerability-detection work often focuses on whether code is currently vulnerable or whether a known vulnerable dependency is already present. We study a different problem: future transitive vulnerability exposure. Given a package-version dependency graph observed at release time, the task is to predict whether any non-root dependency will receive a vulnerability advisory within a future horizon. This problem is important for Web intelligence and software supply-chain security because it supports proactive dependency triage before future exposure is visible. It is also easy to evaluate incorrectly: current vulnerable dependencies can leak the label, and different versions of the same root package can create package-level memorization across train and test splits. We therefore construct PatchRisk, a leakage-aware benchmark from Open Source Vulnerability advisories and deps.dev dependency graphs for npm and PyPI. The benchmark uses filtration-aware labels, package-disjoint evaluation, temporal testing, and nested 1K, 3K, 5K, and 10K sampling scales. The largest cleaned setting contains 9,007 root package-version graphs spanning 4,157 root packages. We evaluate three feature families: TimeOnly, GraphStruct, and HistoryGraph. On the 10K temporal-test benchmark, HistoryGraph improves AUPRC over the strongest TimeOnly baseline from 0.351 to 0.640 for 90-day forecasting and from 0.473 to 0.813 for 365-day forecasting. The improvement remains stable across smaller scales and package-group shuffle robustness tests.