The high number of cyber threats poses significant challenges, with impactful software exploits ranging from data theft to ransomware deployment. Unfortunately, past research highlighted limited security expertise within development teams. Collaboration between developers and security experts, therefore, emerges as one of the few workable means to address this gap. In this paper, we explore the complex interplay between developers and security experts within Scrum, one of the most widely adopted frameworks which actively promotes collaboration, to shed light on their working relationship, challenges, and potential avenues for improvement. To this end, we conducted a qualitative interview study with 14 developers and 13 security experts. Our qualitative results reveal three communication patterns and five shared challenges between the groups affecting the develop-security expert collaboration. Top challenges include consistent interaction difficulties and the lack of workable means to balance business and security needs. As a result, we found that three core Scrum values (openness, respect, courage) are missing from this relationship. Based on our results, we propose recommendations for fostering a healthy collaboration between developers and security experts, both within and beyond Scrum.

Solana gained considerable attention as one of the most popular blockchain platforms for deploying decentralized applications. Compared to Ethereum, however, we observe a lack of research on how Solana smart contract developers handle security, what challenges they encounter, and how this affects the overall security of the ecosystem. To address this, we conducted the first comprehensive study on the Solana platform consisting of a 90-minute Solana smart contract code review task with 35 participants followed by interviews with a subset of seven participants. Our study shows, quite alarmingly, that none of the participants could detect all important security vulnerabilities in a code review task and that 83% of the participants are likely to release vulnerable smart contracts. Our study also sheds light on the root causes of developers' challenges with Solana smart contract development, suggesting the need for better security guidance and resources. In spite of these challenges, our automated analysis on currently deployed Solana smart contracts surprisingly suggests that the prevalence of vulnerabilities - especially those pointed out as the most challenging in our developer study - is below 0.3%. We explore the causes of this counter-intuitive resilience and show that frameworks, such as Anchor, are aiding Solana developers in deploying secure contracts.

Security awareness and training (SAT) vendors operate in a growing multi-billion dollar market. They publish various marketing promises on their websites to their customers -- organizations of all sizes. This paper investigates how these promises align with customers' needs, how they relate to human-centered security challenges highlighted in prior research, and what narrative is presented regarding the role of employees (as SAT recipients). We also investigate the level of transparency in vendor promises, as to whether it constitutes an information asymmetry. We gathered search terms from n=30 awareness professionals to perform an automated Google search and scraping of SAT vendors' websites. We then performed a thematic analysis of 2,476 statements on 156 websites from 59 vendors. We found that the messaging from SAT vendors precisely targets customers' need for easy-to-implement and compliance-fulfilling SAT products; how SAT products are offered also means that some of the impacts of SAT go unmentioned and are transferred to the customer, such as user support. In this vendor-customer relationship, employees are portrayed as a source of weaknesses, needing an indefinite amount of training to be incorporated into the organization's protection. We conclude with suggestions for SAT vendors and regulators, notably toward an SAT ecosystem that directly links SAT solutions to usable security technologies within the organization environment.

To ensure data-privacy compliance, it is common for companies to consult privacy experts for the identification and communication of privacy requirements to software developers. However, developers often fail to fulfill those requirements resulting in companies regularly being fined for violations due to non-compliance with privacy data regulations. To investigate why software developers struggle with the implementation of privacy requirements and explore their communication modality, we conducted a qualitative semi-structured interview study with 30 participants involving 10 software developers, 10 privacy experts, and 10 team coordinators with an average experience of nine years in the privacy communication and implementation process within a company context. We found a communication gap between software developers and privacy experts, suggesting a lack of proper procedural steps during the software development process to guarantee that the privacy requirements have been adequately addressed. We also uncovered that since privacy requirements were mostly communicated in a uni-directional manner, they were often perceived as a hindrance during software development, thus fostering an adversarial relationship between privacy experts and developers. Therefore, in order to fulfill the experts' requirements, software developers requested concrete steps to take during the software development process, as observed in the security field. However, privacy experts often lacked the technical knowledge to provide such instructions. This work contributes an explanatory theory on the communication gap between software developers and privacy experts. We discuss common obstacles in the communication of privacy experts and software developers and provide guidance on how to address them.

Usable and secure authentication on the web and beyond is mission-critical. While password-based authentication is still widespread, users have trouble dealing with potentially hundreds of online accounts and their passwords. Alternatives or extensions such as multi-factor authentication have their own challenges and find only limited adoption. Finding the right balance between security and usability is challenging for developers. Previous work found that developers use online resources to inform security decisions when writing code. Similar to other areas, lots of authentication advice for developers is available online, including blog posts, discussions on Stack Overflow, research papers, or guidelines by institutions like OWASP or NIST.

For software to be secure in practice, users need to be willing and able to appropriately use security features. These features are usually implemented by software professionals during the software development process (SDP), who may be unable to consider the usability of these mechanisms. While research has made progress in supporting developers in creating secure software products, very little attention has been paid to whether and how these security features are made usable. In a semi-structured interview study with 25 software professionals (software developers, designers, architects), we explored how they and other decision-makers encounter and deal with security and usability during the software development process in their companies. Based on 37 hours of interview recordings, we qualitatively analyzed and investigated 23 distinct development contexts in detail. In addition to individual awareness and factors that directly influence the implementation phase, we identify a high impact of contextual factors, such as stakeholder pressure, presence of expertise, and collaboration culture, and the specific implementation of the SDP on usable security in software products. We conclude our work by highlighting important gaps, such as studying and improving contextual factors that contribute to usable security and discussing potential improvements of the status quo.