Abstract
Despite the security community s emphasis on the importance of building secure software, the number of new vulnerabilities found in our systems is increasing. In addition, vulnerabilities that have been studied for years are still commonly reported in vulnerability databases. This paper investigates a new hypothesis that software vulnerabilities are blind spots in developer s heuristic-based decision-making processes. Heuristics are simple computational models to solve problems without considering all the information available. They are an adaptive response to our short working memory because they require less cognitive effort. Our hypothesis is that as software vulnerabilities represent corner cases that exercise unusual information flows, they tend to be left out from the repertoire of heuristics used by developers during their programming tasks. To validate this hypothesis we conducted a study with 47 developers using psychological manipulation. In this study each developer worked for approximately one hour on six vulnerable programming scenarios. The sessions progressed from providing no information about the possibility of vulnerabilities, to priming developers about unexpected results, and explicitly mentioning the existence of vulnerabilities in the code. The results show that (i) security is not a priority in software development environments, (ii) security is not part of developer s mindset while coding, (iii) developers assume common cases for their code, (iv) security thinking requires cognitive effort, (v) security education helps, but developers can have difficulties correlating a particular learned vulnerability or security information with their current working task, and (vi) priming or explicitly cueing about vulnerabilities on-the-spot is a powerful mechanism to make developers aware about potential vulnerabilities.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings - 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 296-305 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Volume | 2014-December |
| Edition | December |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 8 2014 |
| Event | 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014 - New Orleans, United States Duration: Dec 8 2014 → Dec 12 2014 |
Other
| Other | 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| City | New Orleans |
| Period | 12/8/14 → 12/12/14 |
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ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Software
Cite this
Its the psychology stupid : How heuristics explain software vulnerabilities and how priming can illuminate developers blind spots. / Oliveira, Daniela; Rosenthal, Marissa; Morin, N.; Yeh, Kuo Chuan; Cappos, Justin; Zhuang, Y.
Proceedings - 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014. Vol. 2014-December December. ed. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 296-305.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Its the psychology stupid
T2 - How heuristics explain software vulnerabilities and how priming can illuminate developers blind spots
AU - Oliveira, Daniela
AU - Rosenthal, Marissa
AU - Morin, N.
AU - Yeh, Kuo Chuan
AU - Cappos, Justin
AU - Zhuang, Y.
PY - 2014/12/8
Y1 - 2014/12/8
N2 - Despite the security community s emphasis on the importance of building secure software, the number of new vulnerabilities found in our systems is increasing. In addition, vulnerabilities that have been studied for years are still commonly reported in vulnerability databases. This paper investigates a new hypothesis that software vulnerabilities are blind spots in developer s heuristic-based decision-making processes. Heuristics are simple computational models to solve problems without considering all the information available. They are an adaptive response to our short working memory because they require less cognitive effort. Our hypothesis is that as software vulnerabilities represent corner cases that exercise unusual information flows, they tend to be left out from the repertoire of heuristics used by developers during their programming tasks. To validate this hypothesis we conducted a study with 47 developers using psychological manipulation. In this study each developer worked for approximately one hour on six vulnerable programming scenarios. The sessions progressed from providing no information about the possibility of vulnerabilities, to priming developers about unexpected results, and explicitly mentioning the existence of vulnerabilities in the code. The results show that (i) security is not a priority in software development environments, (ii) security is not part of developer s mindset while coding, (iii) developers assume common cases for their code, (iv) security thinking requires cognitive effort, (v) security education helps, but developers can have difficulties correlating a particular learned vulnerability or security information with their current working task, and (vi) priming or explicitly cueing about vulnerabilities on-the-spot is a powerful mechanism to make developers aware about potential vulnerabilities.
AB - Despite the security community s emphasis on the importance of building secure software, the number of new vulnerabilities found in our systems is increasing. In addition, vulnerabilities that have been studied for years are still commonly reported in vulnerability databases. This paper investigates a new hypothesis that software vulnerabilities are blind spots in developer s heuristic-based decision-making processes. Heuristics are simple computational models to solve problems without considering all the information available. They are an adaptive response to our short working memory because they require less cognitive effort. Our hypothesis is that as software vulnerabilities represent corner cases that exercise unusual information flows, they tend to be left out from the repertoire of heuristics used by developers during their programming tasks. To validate this hypothesis we conducted a study with 47 developers using psychological manipulation. In this study each developer worked for approximately one hour on six vulnerable programming scenarios. The sessions progressed from providing no information about the possibility of vulnerabilities, to priming developers about unexpected results, and explicitly mentioning the existence of vulnerabilities in the code. The results show that (i) security is not a priority in software development environments, (ii) security is not part of developer s mindset while coding, (iii) developers assume common cases for their code, (iv) security thinking requires cognitive effort, (v) security education helps, but developers can have difficulties correlating a particular learned vulnerability or security information with their current working task, and (vi) priming or explicitly cueing about vulnerabilities on-the-spot is a powerful mechanism to make developers aware about potential vulnerabilities.
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84954508470&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2664243.2664254
DO - 10.1145/2664243.2664254
M3 - Conference contribution
VL - 2014-December
SP - 296
EP - 305
BT - Proceedings - 30th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, ACSAC 2014
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
ER -