SECURITY AUTOMATION AND VULNERABILITY ANALYSIS IN .NET APPLICATIONS: A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW

Abstract

Application security is a crucial requirement in modern software, but manually detecting vulnerabil-ities is time-consuming and prone to failure. In the context of .NET platforms, widely used in corpo-rate development, automation of security checks and vulnerability analysis emerges as a promising approach to efficiently mitigate risks. This article presents a bibliometric review on “Security Auto-mation and Vulnerability Analysis in .NET Applications”, identifying research trends and existing gaps. Publications indexed in The Lens database (2004–2025) were analyzed following PRISMA criteria, complemented by bibliometric techniques (co-authorship, co-citation, and co-occurrence of keywords) using tools such as VOSviewer. The results reveal a significant growth in work in the last decade, mainly addressing web vulnerabilities (e.g., SQL injection and XSS), as well as recent ap-proaches to machine learning. However, there are important gaps, including the scarcity of studies specifically focused on the .NET ecosystem and low levels of collaboration among researchers. In short, although security automation has advanced, there are still research opportunities to fill the identified gaps, namely by adapting and expanding techniques for the .NET context.