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The rapid adoption of AI coding agents and AI assistant web services is fundamentally changing how developers discover, consume, and interact with technical documentation. This paper studies that transformation across three interconnected…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Oleksii Borysenko

Due to the frequent encountering of web URLs in various application scenarios (e.g., chatting and email reading), many mobile apps build their in-app browsing interfaces (IABIs) to provide a seamless user experience. Although this achieves…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Zicheng Zhang , Daoyuan Wu , Lixiang Li , Debin Gao

Nowadays, invoking third party code increasingly involves calling web services via their web APIs, as opposed to the more traditional scenario of downloading a library and invoking the library's API. However, there are also new challenges…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-05-19 Erik Wittern , Annie Ying , Yunhui Zheng , Jim A. Laredo , Julian Dolby , Christopher C. Young , Aleksander A. Slominski

We conduct a large-scale measurement of developers' insecure practices leading to mini-app to super-app authentication bypass, among which hard-coding developer secrets for such authentication is a major contributor. We also analyze the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Supraja Baskaran , Lianying Zhao , Mohammad Mannan , Amr Youssef

A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2013-07-24 Theodore Book , Dan S. Wallach

Modern distributed applications in healthcare, supply chain, and the Internet of Things handle a large amount of data in a diverse application setting with multiple stakeholders. Such applications leverage advanced artificial intelligence…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Rodrigo Dutra Garcia , Gowri Ramachandran , Kealan Dunnett , Raja Jurdak , Caetano Ranieri , Bhaskar Krishnamachari , Jo Ueyama

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are essential tools for social work researchers aiming to harness advanced technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI services. This paper demystifies APIs and illustrates how they…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Brian E. Perron , Hui Luan , Zia Qi , Bryan G. Victor , Kavin Goyal

We analyzed nearly 460,000 AI model cards from Hugging Face to examine how developers report risks. From these, we extracted around 3,000 unique risk mentions and built the \emph{AI Model Risk Catalog}. We compared these with risks…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Pooja S. B. Rao , Sanja Šćepanović , Dinesh Babu Jayagopi , Mauro Cherubini , Daniele Quercia

As vendors adopt AI technologies, security researchers are working to uncover and fix related vulnerabilities, which is important given AI systems handle sensitive data and critical functions. This process relies on vendors receiving and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yangheran Piao , Jingjie Li , Daniel W. Woods

Throughout 2021, GitGuardian's monitoring of public GitHub repositories revealed a two-fold increase in the number of secrets (database credentials, API keys, and other credentials) exposed compared to 2020, accumulating more than six…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Setu Kumar Basak , Lorenzo Neil , Bradley Reaves , Laurie Williams

According to GitGuardian's monitoring of public GitHub repositories, the exposure of secrets (API keys and other credentials) increased two-fold in 2021 compared to 2020, totaling more than six million secrets. However, no benchmark dataset…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Setu Kumar Basak , Lorenzo Neil , Bradley Reaves , Laurie Williams

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Costanza Alfieri , Juri Di Rocco , Paola Inverardi , Phuong T. Nguyen

Programmers use security APIs to embed security into the applications they develop. Security vulnerabilities get introduced into those applications, due to the usability issues that exist in the security APIs. Improving usability of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-03-30 Chamila Wijayarathna , Nalin A. G. Arachchilage , Jill Slay

With the increasing concerns around privacy and the enforcement of data privacy laws, many websites now provide users with privacy controls. However, locating these controls can be challenging, as they are frequently hidden within multiple…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Rahat Masood , Sunday Oyinlola Ogundoyin , Muhammad Ikram , Alex Ye

APIs are the primary mechanism for developers to gain access to externally defined services and tools. However, previous research has revealed API misuses that violate the contract of APIs to be prevalent. Such misuses can have harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Rodrigo Bonifacio , Stefan Krüger , Krishna Narasimhan , Eric Bodden , Mira Mezini

We analyzed 3,984 AI agent skills from major marketplaces and found 76 confirmed malicious payloads, including credential theft, backdoor installation, and data exfiltration. 13.4% of all skills contain at least one critical-level security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Luca Beurer-Kellner , Aleksei Kudrinskii , Marco Milanta , Kristian Bonde Nielsen , Hemang Sarkar , Liran Tal

Implementing a security mechanism on top of APIs requires clear understanding of the semantics of each API, to ensure that security entitlements are enforced consistently and completely across all APIs that could perform the same function…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Somesh Jha , Mihai Christodorescu , Anh Pham

A good documentation is essential for a good usability of (security) APIs, i.e. especially for the correct use of the APIs. Requirements for good documentation of APIs have been described in several papers, but there is no technical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Rolf Huesmann , Alexander Zeier , Andreas Heinemann , Alexander Wiesmaier

Modern web applications rely heavily on client-side API calls to fetch data, render content, and communicate with backend services. However, the quality of these network interactions (redundant requests, missing cache headers, oversized…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ali Hassaan Mughal , Muhammad Bilal , Noor Fatima

Modern web applications make extensive use of API calls to update the UI state in response to user events or server-side changes. For such applications, API-level testing can play an important role, in-between unit-level testing and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Rahulkrishna Yandrapally , Saurabh Sinha , Rachel Tzoref-Brill , Ali Mesbah