Adversarial Machine Learning: On the Resilience of Third-party Library Recommender Systems

In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the application of Machine Learning algorithms in several domains, including the development of recommender systems for software engineering (RSSE). While researchers focused on the underpinning ML techniques to improve recommendation accuracy, little attention has been paid to make such systems robust and resilient to malicious data. By manipulating the algorithms’ training set, i.e., large open-source software (OSS) repositories, it would be possible to make recommender systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper presents an initial investigation of adversarial machine learning and its possible implications on RSSE. As a proof-of-concept, we show the extent to which the presence of manipulated data can have a negative impact on the outcomes of two state-of-the-art recommender systems which suggest third-party libraries to developers. Our work aims at raising awareness of adversarial techniques and their effects on the Software Engineering community. We also propose equipping recommender systems with the capability to learn to dodge adversarial activities.