Affiliation:
1. University of Bristol, UK
2. University of Durham, UK
Abstract
Producing secure software is challenging. The poor usability of security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) makes this even harder. Many recommendations have been proposed to support developers by improving the usability of cryptography libraries—rooted in wider
best practice
guidance in software engineering and API design. In this SLR, we systematize knowledge regarding these recommendations. We identify and analyze 65 papers, offering 883 recommendations. Through thematic analysis, we identify seven core ways to improve usability of APIs. Most of the recommendations focus on helping API developers to
construct
and
structure
their code and make it more usable and easier for programmers to
understand
. There is less focus, however, on
documentation
,
writing requirements
,
code quality assessment
, and the impact of
organizational software development practices
. By tracing and analyzing paper ancestry, we map how this knowledge becomes validated and translated over time. We find that very few API usability recommendations are empirically validated, and that recommendations specific to usable security APIs lag even further behind.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献