Related papers: Stack Overflow: A Code Laundering Platform?
Motivation: Code understandability is crucial in software development, as developers spend 58% to 70% of their time reading source code. Improving it can improve productivity and reduce maintenance costs. Problem: Experimental studies often…
Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest…
Object-oriented code smells are well-known concepts in software engineering that refer to bad design and development practices commonly observed in software systems. With the emergence of mobile apps, new classes of code smells have been…
Python is a popular, widely used, and general-purpose programming language. In spite of its ever-growing community, researchers have not performed much analysis on Python's topics, trends, and technologies which provides insights for…
We surveyed 97 developers who had used cryptography in open-source projects, in the hope of identifying developer security and cryptography practices. We asked them about individual and company-level practices, and divided respondents into…
Intelligent services are becoming increasingly more pervasive; application developers want to leverage the latest advances in areas such as computer vision to provide new services and products to users, and large technology firms enable…
Context: Cryptographic APIs are said to be not usable and researchers suggest to add example code to the documentation. Aim: We wanted to create a free platform for cryptographic code examples that improves the usability and security of…
Access to privacy-sensitive information on Android is a growing concern in the mobile community. Albeit Google Play recently introduced some privacy guidelines, it is still an open problem to soundly verify whether apps actually comply with…
Millions of users visit Stack Overflow regularly to ask community for answers to their programming questions. However, like many other platforms, Stack Overflow consistently struggles with low user retention and declining levels of user…
Java platform and third-party libraries provide various security features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing these features can cost tremendous time and effort of developers or cause security vulnerabilities in software. Prior…
Although there are over 1,600,000 third-party Android apps in the Google Play Store, little has been conclusively shown about how their individual (and collective) permission usage has evolved over time. Recently, Android 6 overhauled the…
The Covid-19 outbreak, beyond its tragic effects, has changed to an unprecedented extent almost every aspect of human activity throughout the world. At the same time, the pandemic has stimulated enormous amount of research by scientists…
With the recent advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-based code generation tools become a practical solution for software development. GitHub Copilot, the AI pair programmer, utilizes machine…
Programmers often seek help from Q\&A websites to resolve issues they encounter during programming. Stack Overflow has been a widely used platform for this purpose for over a decade. Recently, revolutionary AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT…
Deep Learning (DL) is finding its way into a growing number of mobile software applications. These software applications, named as DL based mobile applications (abbreviated as mobile DL apps) integrate DL models trained using large-scale…
Developers are increasingly integrating Language Models (LMs) into their mobile apps to provide features such as chat-based assistants. To prevent LM misuse, they impose various restrictions, including limits on the number of queries, input…
Many Android applications collect data from users. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires vendors to faithfully disclose which data their apps collect. This task is complicated because many apps use…
Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD-3-Clause dominate open-source AI, signaling that artifacts like models, datasets, and code can be freely used, modified, and redistributed. However, these licenses carry mandatory…
Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on…
In this paper, we present the first large-scale and systematic study to characterize the code reuse practice in the Ethereum smart contract ecosystem. We first performed a detailed similarity comparison study on a dataset of 10 million…