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GitHub provides developers with a practical way to distribute source code and collaboratively work on common projects. To enhance account security and privacy, GitHub allows its users to manage access permissions, review audit logs, and…
Version control systems for source code, such as Git, are key tools in modern software development environments. Many developers use online services, such as GitHub or GitLab, for collaborative software development. While software projects…
Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better…
Given programming languages can provide different types and levels of security support, it is critically important to consider security aspects while selecting programming languages for developing software systems. Inadequate consideration…
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…
The aim of this work is to study the evolution of password selection among users. We investigate whether users follow best practices when selecting passwords and identify areas in need of improvement. Four distinct publicly-available…
Password guessers are instrumental for assessing the strength of passwords. Despite their diversity and abundance, little is known about how different guessers compare to each other. We perform in-depth analyses and comparisons of the…
Does the act of writing a specification (how the code should behave) for a piece of security sensitive code lead to developers producing more secure code? We asked 138 developers to write a snippet of code to store a password: Half of them…
The absolute majority of software today is developed collaboratively using collaborative version control tools such as Git. It is a common practice that once a vulnerability is detected and fixed, the developers behind the software issue a…
The number of people accessing online services is increasing day by day, and with new users, comes a greater need for effective and responsive cyber-security. Our goal in this study was to find out if there are common patterns within the…
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones that…
Although it is common for users to select bad passwords that can be easily cracked by attackers, password-based authentication remains the most widely-used method. To encourage users to select good passwords, enterprises often enforce…
In recent decades, criminals have increasingly used the web to research, assist and perpetrate criminal behaviour. One of the most important ways in which law enforcement can battle this growing trend is through accessing pertinent…
Software quality is an important problem for technology companies, since it substantially impacts the efficiency, usefulness, and maintainability of the final product; hence, code review is a must-do activity for software developers. During…
GitHub is one of the most widely used public code development platform. However, the code hosted publicly on the platform is vulnerable to commit spoofing that allows an adversary to introduce malicious code or commits into the repository…
Hosting over 10 million of software projects, GitHub is one of the most important data sources to study behavior of developers and software projects. However, with the increase of the size of open source datasets, the potential threats to…
Leaks from password datasets are a regular occurrence. An organization may defend a leak with reassurances that just a small subset of passwords were taken. In this paper we show that the leak of a relatively small number of text-based…
Social Coding Platforms (SCPs) like GitHub have become central to modern software engineering thanks to their collaborative and version-control features. Like in mainstream Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, users of SCPs are…
Security issue reports are the primary means of informing development teams of security risks in projects, but little is known about current practices. We aim to understand the characteristics of these reports in open-source projects and…
The choice of programming language is a very important decision as it not only affects the performance and maintainability of the software but also dictates the talent pool and community support available. To better understand the…