Do security patterns really help designers?

Publikationstyp
Conference Paper
Publikationsdatum
2015-05
Sprache
English
Author
Yskout, Koen 
Scandariato, Riccardo 
Joosen, Wouter 
TORE-URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11420/14860
Volume
1
Start Page
292
End Page
302
Article Number
7194582
Citation
Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering 1: 7194582, 292-302 (2015-08-12)
Contribution to Conference
37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2015 
Publisher DOI
10.1109/ICSE.2015.49
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-84951776720
Publisher
IEEE
Security patterns are well-known solutions to security-specific problems. They are often claimed to benefit designers without much security expertise. We have performed an empirical study to investigate whether the usage of security patterns by such an audience leads to a more secure design, or to an increased productivity of the designers. Our study involved 32 teams of master students enrolled in a course on software architecture, working on the design of a realisticallysized banking system. Irrespective of whether the teams were using security patterns, we have not been able to detect a difference between the two treatment groups. However, the teams prefer to work with the support of security patterns.
DDC Class
004: Informatik