Do AI Coding Assistants Check Before They Install? A Pre-Registered Demand-Side Audit of Trust Signals in the Research Software Supply Chain
AI coding assistants now select, install, and configure software, and attackers have exploited that position through invented package names, compromised maintainer accounts, and manipulated repository text. In response, the supply-chain community publishes machine-checkable trust signals: software bills of materials, signed releases, build provenance attestations, and declared official channels. Whether coding assistants read or act on those signals has not been measured for any of these classes on research software. We pre-registered and ran a controlled study on six open-source research software projects (three HPC, three quantum computing) drawn from an 87-project corpus, with protocol...
| Authors | Pengyin Shan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 7 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 September 2026 |
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