Code Reviewing as Methodology for Online Security Studies with Developers - A Case Study with Freelancers on Password Storage

Abstract

While ample experience with end-user studies exists, only little is known about studies with software developers in a security context. In past research investigating the security behavior of software developers, participants often had to complete programming tasks. However, programming tasks require a large amount of participants’ time and effort, which often results in high costs and small sample sizes. We therefore tested a new methodology for security developer studies. In an online study, we asked freelance developers to write code reviews for password-storage code snippets. Since developers often tend to focus on functionality first and security later, similar to end users, we prompted half the participants for security. Although the freelancers indicated that they feel responsible for security, our results showed that they did not focus on security in their code reviews, even in a securitycritical task such as password-storage. Almost half the participants wanted to release the insecure code snippets. However, we found that security prompting had a significant effect on the security awareness. To provide further insight into this line of work, we compared our results with similar passwordstorage studies containing programming tasks, and discussed code reviewing as a new methodology for future security research with developers.