Stack Overflow Considered Harmful? The Impact of Copy&Paste on Android Application Security
By Felix Fischer, Konstantin Böttinger, Huang Xiao, Christian Stransky, Yasemin Acar, Michael Backes, Sascha Fahl. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2017
300 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Online programming discussion platforms such as Stack Overflow serve as a rich source of information for software developers. Available information include vibrant discussions and oftentimes ready-to-use code snippets. Previous research identified Stack Overflow as one of the most important information sources developers rely on. Anecdotes report that software developers copy and paste code snippets from those information sources for convenience reasons. Such behavior results in a constant flow of community-provided code snippets into production software. To date, the impact of this behaviour on code security is unknown. We answer this highly important question by quantifying the proliferation of security-related code snippets from Stack Overflow in Android applications available on Google Play. Access to the rich source of information available on Stack Overflow including ready-to-use code snippets provides huge benefits for software developers. However, when it comes to code security there are some caveats to bear in mind: Due to the complex nature of code security, it is very difficult to provide ready-to-use and secure solutions for every problem. Hence, integrating a security-related code snippet from Stack Overflow into production software requires caution and expertise. Unsurprisingly, we observed insecure code snippets being copied into Android applications millions of users install from Google Play every day. To quantitatively evaluate the extent of this observation, we scanned Stack Overflow for code snippets and evaluated their security score using a stochastic gradient descent classifier. In order to identify code reuse in Android applications, we applied state-of-the-art static analysis. Our results are alarming: 15.4% of the 1.3 million Android applications we analyzed, contained security-related code snippets from Stack Overflow. Out of these 97.9% contain at least one insecure code snippet.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Signal Processing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bcaccc59a49cd2856e982043576540a42340149
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Citations in the corpus
- An Empirical Study of C++ Vulnerabilities in Crowd-Sourced Code Examples (2019, methodology): “One of the challenges in software is the reuse of vulnerable codes to accelerate the development of a software product, which ultimately leads to a decrease in software quality [8], [9].”
- Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? (2022, unknown): “• Correct if it can encrypt/decrypt messages of any length • Partially Correct if this condition holds only for messages of • Incorrect if this condition does not hold”
- Security Developer Studies with GitHub Users: Exploring a Convenience Sample (2017, background): “INTRODUCTION The usable security community is increasingly considering how to improve security decision-making not only for end users, but for information technology professionals, including system administrators and software developers [1, 2, 9, 10, 39].”