CryptoExplorer: An Interactive Web Platform Supporting Secure Use of Cryptography APIs

Abstract

Research has shown that cryptographic APIs are hard to use. Consequently, developers resort to using code examples available in online information sources that are often not secure.We have developed a web platform, named CryptoExplorer, stocked with numerous real-world secure and insecure examples that developers can explore to learn how to use cryptographic APIs properly. This platform currently provides 3 263 secure uses, and 5 897 insecure uses of Java Cryptography Architecture mined from 2 324 Java projects on GitHub.A preliminary study shows that CryptoExplorer provides developers with secure crypto API use examples instantly, developers can save time compared to searching on the internet for such examples, and they learn to avoid using certain algorithms in APIs by studying misused API examples.We have a pipeline to regularly mine more projects, and, on request, we offer our dataset to researchers.

Java Cryptography Uses in the Wild

“…(5) Why do some developers perform be er in using cryptography? (6) What is the performance of the static analysis tool in detecting crypto misuses? (7) What is the benchmark result of comparing several static analysis tools in detecting crypto uses of the dataset's projects?…”

“…An experiment with 53 developers shows that API-integrated security hints help 73% of developers to write more secure code [4]. In the same vein, researchers have provided developers with an interactive web platform to access correct uses of crypto APIs [6].…”