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arXiv · 2108.07141

Hurdles for Developers in Cryptography

Mohammadreza Hazhirpasand·Oscar Nierstrasz·Mohammadhossein Shabani·Mohammad Ghafari
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Abstract

Prior research has shown that cryptography is hard to use for developers. We aim to understand what cryptography issues developers face in practice. We clustered 91954 cryptography-related questions on the Stack Overflow website, and manually analyzed a significant sample (i.e., 383) of the questions to comprehend the crypto challenges developers commonly face in this domain. We found that either developers have a distinct lack of knowledge in understanding the fundamental concepts, \eg OpenSSL, public-key cryptography or password hashing, or the usability of crypto libraries undermined developer performance to correctly realize a crypto scenario. This is alarming and indicates the need for dedicated research to improve the design of crypto APIs.

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Mohammadreza Hazhirpasand, Oscar Nierstrasz, Mohammadhossein Shabani, Mohammad Ghafari. 2021-08-16. Hurdles for Developers in Cryptography. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07141

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