babylonpolice.com

Background: Software security is crucial to ensure that the users are
protected from undesirable consequences such as malware attacks which can
result in loss of data and, subsequently, financial loss. Technical Debt (TD)
is a metaphor incurred by suboptimal decisions resulting in long-term
consequences such as increased defects and vulnerabilities if not managed.
Although previous studies have studied the relationship between security and
TD, examining their intersection in developers' discussion on Stack Overflow
(SO) is still unexplored. Aims: This study investigates the characteristics of
security-related TD questions on SO. More specifically, we explore the
prevalence of TD in security-related queries, identify the security tags most
prone to TD, and investigate which user groups are more aware of TD. Method: We
mined 117,233 security-related questions on SO and used a deep-learning
approach to identify 45,078 security-related TD questions. Subsequently, we
conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collected
security-related TD questions, including sentiment analysis. Results: Our
analysis revealed that 38% of the security questions on SO are security-related
TD questions. The most recurrent tags among the security-related TD questions
emerged as "security" and "encryption." The latter typically have a neutral
sentiment, are lengthier, and are posed by users with higher reputation scores.
Conclusions: Our findings reveal that developers implicitly discuss TD,
suggesting developers have a potential knowledge gap regarding the TD metaphor
in the security domain. Moreover, we identified the most common security topics
mentioned in TD-related posts, providing valuable insights for developers and
researchers to assist developers in prioritizing security concerns in order to
minimize TD and enhance software security.