TWC: Small: Empirical Evaluation of the Usability and Security Implications of Application Programming Interface Design

这个项目的目标是收集经验证据的安全性和可用性之间的权衡编程语言和库设计。尽管众所周知，设计不良的接口会导致缺陷率和软件漏洞增加，但目前很少有针对设计人员的具体指导，说明哪些精确的语言和库功能使程序员更有可能或更少地编写易受攻击的代码。此外，现有的指导很少以经验为基础。该项目将就两个问题制定基于实践的指导。首先，ISO/IEC C编程语言标准化工作组目前正在评估多个向该语言添加并发性的提案，该项目将产生数据以告知他们的决策过程。其次，通过评估使用可变性的影响，该项目将提供可能影响未来编程语言和库设计的数据。该项目包括三个部分。第一阶段是分析代码中的缺陷，这些代码使用了正在考虑的C并发API的草案版本，以及与并发相关的缺陷的可比Java数据库。在第二和第三阶段，将要求有2到5年经验的程序员使用竞争性界面设计完成任务。第一组实验将评估竞争的C和C++并行语言扩展，以确定哪种语言和库功能更有可能导致安全代码。具体来说，调查人员将测量程序员生成没有安全相关缺陷的并发代码的能力，例如使用不同库的“数据竞争”和“检查时间到使用时间”错误。然后，研究人员将在这项工作的基础上，评估在使用不变性来减少并发代码中漏洞的可能性时，安全性和可用性之间的权衡。通过这两个实验，该项目将通过开发一种方法来推进网络安全科学，该方法用于实证评估库和语言设计如何影响训练有素的专业程序员在实施过程中无意中引入安全漏洞的频率。

The objective of this project is to gather empirical evidence on the tradeoffs between security and usability in programming language and library design. Although it is well known that poorly-designed interfaces can lead to increased defect rates and software vulnerabilities, there is currently little specific guidance to designers on what precise language and library features make programmers more or less likely to write vulnerable code. Furthermore, little of the existing guidance is empirically based. The project will develop empirically-based guidance on two issues. First, the ISO/IEC standardization working group for the C programming language is currently evaluating multiple proposals for adding concurrency to the language, and this project will produce data to inform their decision-making process. Second, by evaluating the impact of the use of mutability, the project will provide data that may influence how future programming languages and libraries are designed. The project involves three parts. The first phase is an analysis of flaws in code that uses the draft versions of the C concurrency APIs under consideration as well as comparable Java databases on concurrency-related flaws. In the second and third phases, programmers who have between 2 and 5 years of experience will be asked to complete tasks using competing interface designs. The first set of experiments will evaluate competing C and C++ parallel language extensions to determine which language and library features are more likely to result in secure code. Specifically, the investigators will measure the programmers' ability to produce concurrent code free from security-related defects, such as "data races" and "time-of-check-to-time-of-use" errors using the different libraries. The investigators will then build upon this work to evaluate tradeoffs between security and usability when using immutability to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities in concurrent code. Through these two experiments, the project will advance the science of cybersecurity by developing a methodology for empirically evaluating how library and language design affect the frequency with which trained professional programmers inadvertently introduce security vulnerabilities during implementation.