Human Attributes & Behaviors Influencing Troubled Software (HABITS)

Developing secure software is notoriously difficult, partially evidenced by the increasing trend in vulnerabilities disclosed per year. While significant effort has gone into developing tools and automated test frameworks, human behavioral aspects of the software development process have remained relatively unexplored. These behavioral aspects, such as relying on inexperienced developers or prolonged periods of conflict among team members, are often responsible for the propagation of bugs and vulnerabilities, the delay of security patches, the postponement in product releases, and the abandonment of entire open source projects. Star Lab proposes to research and develop an approach to integrate these human dimensions into security metrics and the software development process. This efforts goal is to reduce the incidence of faulty and/or insecure code attributable to these human factors. Star Lab will develop tools to collect, condition, and fuse publicly available communications and development artifacts from individuals participating in open source development communities. This data will then inform behavioral security models for evaluating individuals in a software development community and the communitys practices.