GoSurf: Identifying Software Supply Chain Attack Vectors in Go

In Go, the widespread adoption of open-source software has led to a flourishing ecosystem of third-party dependencies, which are often integrated into critical systems.

However, the reuse of dependencies introduces significant supply chain security risks, as a single compromised package can have cascading impacts.

Existing supply chain attack taxonomies overlook language-specific features that can be exploited by attackers to hide malicious code.

In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy of 12 distinct attack vectors tailored for the Go language and its package lifecycle.

Our taxonomy identifies patterns in which language-specific Go features, intended for benign purposes, can be misused to propagate malicious code stealthily through supply chains.

Additionally, we introduce GoSurf, a static analysis tool that analyzes the attack surface of Go packages according to our proposed taxonomy.

We evaluate GoSurf on a corpus of widely used, real-world Go packages.

Our work provides preliminary insights for securing the open-source software supply chain within the Go ecosystem, allowing developers and security analysts to prioritize code audit efforts and uncover hidden malicious behaviors.