Optimization of Secure Coding Practices in SDLC as Part of Cybersecurity Framework

Cybersecurity is a global goal that is central to national security planning in many countries. One of the most active research fields is design of practices for the development of so-called highly secure software as a kind of protection and reduction of the risks from cyber threats. The use of a secure software product in a real environment enables the reduction of the vulnerability of the system as a whole. It would be logical to find the most optimal solution for the integration of secure coding in the classic SDLC (software development life cycle). This paper aims to suggest practices and tips that should be followed for secure coding, in order to avoid cost and time overruns because of untimely identification of security issues. It presents the implementation of secure coding practices in software development, and showcases several real-world scenarios from different phases of the SDLC, as well as mitigation strategies. The paper covers techniques for SQL injection mitigation, authentication management for staging environments, and access control verification using JSON Web Tokens

Where to Recruit for Security Development Studies: Comparing Six Software Developer Samples

Studying developers is an important aspect of usable security and privacy research. In particular, studying security development challenges such as the usability of security APIs, the secure use of information sources during development or the effectiveness of IDE security plugins raised interest in recent years. However, recruiting skilled participants with software development experience is particularly challenging, and it is often not clear what security researchers can expect from certain participant samples, which can make research results hard to compare and interpret. Hence, in this work, we study for the first time opportunities and challenges of different platforms to recruit participants with software development experience for security development studies. First, we identify popular recruitment platforms in 59 papers. Then, we conduct a comparative online study with 706 participants based on self-reported software development experience across six recruitment platforms. Using an online questionnaire, we investigate participants’ programming and security experiences, skills and knowledge. We find that participants across all samples report rich general software development and security experience, skills, and knowledge. Based on our results, we recommend developer recruitment from Upwork for practical coding studies and Amazon MTurk along with a pre-screening survey to reduce additional noise for larger studies. Both of these, along with Freelancer, are also recommended for security studies. We conclude the paper by discussing the impact of our results on future security development studies