Co-author here. The paper reports on a system that is being run on 100s of repos at Microsoft.
72 karma · joined May 20, 2013
https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/46926997/main2.pdf
TLDR: it boils down to analysing dependencies at the level of the callgraph; but building those callgraphs isn't easy. The benefit in the security use case is ~3x increased accuracy when identifying vulnerable packages (by eliminating false positives).