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Section
open-source
Kind
Editorial
Reading time
4 min
Updated
8 September 2026

Your Open Source Dependency Has One Maintainer: Assessing the Risk

Popular open source projects provide crucial building blocks to modern applications. But relying on a dependency with just one maintainer carries significant risk, no matter how much it is used. Too many organizations treat a library's popularity alone as a proxy for safety, only to discover the hard way that dependencies must also be actively maintained, observable in development, and reproducible in builds if they are to be trusted.

How can a project decide whether its critical dependencies are robust enough before a crisis forces the decision? This guide walks through the observability signals, security questions, and reproducibility measures that should inform the review process - and outlines practical steps when a project has to keep depending on a risky, but essential library.

Project Health Signals to Observe

Before diving into the details of a dependency's security posture, it is crucial to assess whether the project itself follows healthy practices and has sufficient depth of maintenance. OWASP's Software Supply Chain Security Cheat Sheet advises teams to thoroughly review a third-party component before incorporating it, with an emphasis on:

  • Clear evidence of active maintenance, not unlike OWASP’s emphasis on whether a project is currently being maintained and whether the project’s maintainers are accessible and responsive.
  • An active issue tracker with a frequent pattern of submissions, response from maintainers, and resolution within a reasonable timeframe dependent on the library's scope.
  • Management of dependencies, not unlike OWASP’s seriousness on keeping dependencies updated.
  • Processes for reporting vulnerabilities and addressing them in a timely manner.
  • A significant number of maintainers and contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, to guard against risks in a sole maintainer model.
  • Transparency over the project’s backing, to ascertain whether a corporation, foundation, or community ultimately shoulders the responsibility.
  • Frequent releases and a consistent cadence that tracks development activity.
  • Healthy pluralities in the project’s contributor base, with increasing patterns over time rather than spikes from a single user.
  • Established practices to reduce the risk if maintenance were to change suddenly, including documenting the build, using a repository, and contributing back to the upstream.
  • One hobbyist building a rather than following the Reproducible Builds project's standards creates bit-for-bit-identical binaries.
  • The project’s build pipeline signs the output of each step and validates checksums of dependencies before ingestion, not unlike the CNCF notation on signing.

With the financial, legal, and operational risks of a dependency outage in mind, these observability signals are crucial in assessing the maintainability of a project and its ability to keep up with that risk. Any gap in maintainer depth, contribution pluralities, release cadence, dependency hygiene, or reproducibility should immediately prompt a deeper security review.

Security Questions Before Adoption

As with any third-party library, a thorough security review is essential before adopting an open source dependency - especially if evidence of the maintainability gaps outlined above are found on observation.

The CNCF TAG Security’s "Secure Supply Chain Assessment", recommends teams consider several key measures in a dependency’s interaction with the supply chain, including:

  • The number of maintainers and their backgrounds
  • Regular scanning for vulnerabilities
  • Monitoring for issues and updates
  • The build pipeline’s signing and checksum steps
  • Whether the project generates verifiable, reproducible binaries

Beyond the supply chain itself, teams should also directly ask about:

  • Vulnerability Reporting channels and SLA
  • Any funding, sponsorship, or entity backing the project

It is crucial to remember that these questions are not solely assessing the dependency’s contributions to a project; they are establishing a baseline of contribution criteria which if it’s failed it becomes the rationale for the mitigation planning actions taken in the next section.

Reproducible Builds for Transparency and Integrity

The final front for teams to assess before accepting a dependency is ensuring the reproduction of builds against a baseline. If a build process cannot reliably achieve the same output from the same commit and environment, a necessary form of verifiable code auditing is lost.

OWASP stresses the importance in its Cheat Sheet series for the same Bit-for-bit tests while Carnegie Mellon’s Empirical Study on Reproducible Packaging examines reproducible packaging practices. Even without those studies, a team can discern whether a maintainer has gone through the steps to make a build reproducible through documentation.

Mitigating Risks When Exiting Is Not an Option

For any dependency a team deems risky but essential, the goal is not just knowing the problem, but defining a mitigation strategy based on the gaps in the observability and security questions above. Recommendations that depend on a maintainability assessment, such as to:

  • Pin a dependency to a specific release, and keep the pinned usage under constant watch
  • Vendor the dependency, to have a replicable copy of the source under full control
  • Build an in-house alternative, perhaps with guidance from the current maintainers
  • Actively contribute to the project, increasing the maintainer base or funding

Each of these actions requires a different threshold and evidence of the gaps they address; sourcing a project’s positions on pinch, vendor, and contribute policies can provide the rationale.

Final Review: Risk, Observability, Mitigation

Every dependency a team incorporates into a project carries risk, but just as importantly, it carries the possibility of improved observability when maintainability and reproducibility practices are followed. If critical open source libraries fail the tests, a team has more than a crisis -- they have a start on crisis mitigation. On the other hand, a team that acts on observability signals before issues surface can prove out a dependency’s contributions and mitigate against the event of a maintenance issue in the future.