Dazed and Confused: What’s Wrong with Crypto Libraries? — Threats to Validity

Written by cryptocolumns | Published 2024/06/15
Tech Story Tags: cryptographic-apis | crypto-library-usability | security-vulnerabilities | encryption-issues | api-misuse | stack-overflow-analysis | crypto-libraries | cryptography

TLDRIn this paper, researchers look into the types of problems that exist in various crypto libraries. via the TL;DR App

Authors:

(1) Mohammadreza Hazhirpasand, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland;

(2) Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland;

(3) Mohammad Ghafari, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Table of Links

IV. THREATS TO VALIDITY

We selected 25 posts from each crypto library. This may not be a representative sample of the whole population; however, we were particularly interested in the common themes of issues in various libraries, not just one library. We selected the latest posts that are active on Stack Overflow that had at least one answer and skipped the recent questions to which nobody responded as well as the questions with no positive received votes. Nonetheless, there are various approaches to choose the posts, e.g., the number of answers or the number of views, while each of them can impose some threats to validity. To reduce subjectivity, two authors of this paper carefully performed thematic analysis to extract the themes. The final list of themes is deduced based on their discussions and crosschecking. Nevertheless, a few posts could have been assigned to other themes or a current theme could have been divided into several sub-themes. We may not have covered all the crypto libraries discussed on Stack Overflow, but we indeed selected the popular ones.

This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.


Written by cryptocolumns | Your go-to source for in-depth analysis and insights into the world of cryptocurrency. Stay informed, stay ahead.
Published by HackerNoon on 2024/06/15