What Security Questions Do Developers Ask? A Large-Scale Study of Stack Overflow Posts

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• 作者：Xin-Li Yang ; David Lo ; Xin Xia ; Zhi-Yuan Wan…
• 关键词：security ; Stack Overflow ; empirical study ; topic model
• 刊名：Journal of Computer Science and Technology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：September 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：31
• 期：5
• 页码：910-924
• 全文大小：1,106 KB
• 刊物类别：Computer Science
• 刊物主题：Computer Science, general
  Software Engineering
  Theory of Computation
  Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory
  Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
  Information Systems Applications and The Internet
  Chinese Library of Science
  
• 出版者：Springer Boston
• ISSN：1860-4749
• 卷排序：31

文摘

Security has always been a popular and critical topic. With the rapid development of information technology, it is always attracting people’s attention. However, since security has a long history, it covers a wide range of topics which change a lot, from classic cryptography to recently popular mobile security. There is a need to investigate security-related topics and trends, which can be a guide for security researchers, security educators and security practitioners. To address the above-mentioned need, in this paper, we conduct a large-scale study on security-related questions on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a popular on-line question and answer site for software developers to communicate, collaborate, and share information with one another. There are many different topics among the numerous questions posted on Stack Overflow and security-related questions occupy a large proportion and have an important and significant position. We first use two heuristics to extract from the dataset the questions that are related to security based on the tags of the posts. And then we use an advanced topic model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) tuned using Genetic Algorithm (GA), to cluster different security-related questions based on their texts. After obtaining the different topics of security-related questions, we use their metadata to make various analyses. We summarize all the topics into five main categories, and investigate the popularity and difficulty of different topics as well. Based on the results of our study, we conclude several implications for researchers, educators and practitioners.