The rise of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT enables non-programmers to bypass programming screening questions, undermining internal validity in usable security and privacy, and software engineering studies. Past ChatGPT-resistant tasks proposed static visual questions, which ChatGPT can now circumvent. Therefore, we tested alternative approaches such as video- and audio-based screeners that reveal key information step by step under strict time constraints to distinguish programmers from non-programmers. To this end, we conducted a study with 74 participants across three groups: programmers, non-programmers without AI assistance, and non-programmers using ChatGPT. Our results showed that audio-based screeners were robust against ChatGPT-based cheating, as non-programmers struggled to find correct answers within time limits, whereas programmers demonstrated high accuracy with minimal time pressure. Based on our findings, we recommend six audio-based ChatGPT-resistant screening questions that maximize screening effectiveness and efficiency and suggest a 215-second instrument that includes 95.87% of programmers while excluding 99.69% of non-programmers.

Past research showed that software developers often require explicit instructions to implement security measures. With the rapid rise of AI assistant tools such as ChatGPT, it remains unclear whether AI assistance supports or undermines secure practices, whether explicit security instructions are still essential, and how developers behave without guidance. To investigate these research questions, we conducted a qualitative lab study with 21 computer science students and a quantitative online study with 80 freelance developers. We focused on secure password storage and asked participants to implement registration logic under four conditions: without instructions, with AI assistance, with security instructions, or with both AI assistance and security instructions. Our study reveals a clear behavioral shift: In our task, many participants relied on AI-assisted code generation for security-related tasks, often prioritizing convenience over security. However, explicit security-focused instructions can redirect this behavior toward secure outcomes, demonstrating that AI tools alone are insufficient without targeted guidance.

Effective communication is crucial for meeting security needs, yet gender-related communication challenges faced by women security experts within software development remain underexplored.In an interview study with 25 women security experts, we investigated gender-related communication challenges hindering the adoption of security requirements, and strategies to overcome these.Key challenges included the undervaluation of women's security expertise, communication barriers, resistance to women's security-related suggestions, and instances of hostility.Communication challenges with stakeholders who were men disrupted team collaboration, resulting in delays, weakened security measures, and increased organizational risk.Consequently, women security experts often had to adopt strategies, such as leveraging allied men and overpreparing, to assert their security competence.We further offer insights into women's participation in security studies.Based on our findings, we provide recommendations on how to address gender-related challenges.

While protecting user data is essential, software developers often fail to fulfill privacy requirements. However, the reasons why they struggle with privacy-compliant implementation remain unclear. Is it due to a lack of knowledge, or is it because of insufficient support? To provide foundational insights in this field, we conducted a qualitative 5-hour programming study with 30 professional software developers implementing 3 privacy-sensitive programming tasks that were designed with GDPR compliance in mind. To explore if and how developers implement privacy requirements, participants were divided into 3 groups: control, privacy prompted, and privacy expert-supported. After task completion, we conducted follow-up interviews. Alarmingly, almost all participants submitted non-GDPR-compliant solutions (79/90). In particular, none of the 3 tasks were solved privacy-compliant by all 30 participants, with the non-prompted group having the lowest number of 3 out of 30 privacy-compliant solution attempts. Privacy prompting and expert support only slightly improved participants' submissions, with 6/30 and 8/30 privacy-compliant attempts, respectively. In fact, all participants reported severe issues addressing common privacy requirements such as purpose limitation, user consent, or data minimization. Counterintuitively, although most developers exhibited minimal confidence in their solutions, they rarely sought online assistance or contacted the privacy expert, with only 4 out of 10 expert-supported participants explicitly asking for compliance confirmation. Instead, participants often relied on existing implementations and focused on implementing functionality and security first.

To ensure the validity of software engineering and IT security studies with professional programmers, it is essential to identify participants without programming skills. Existing screening questions are efficient, cheating robust, and effectively differentiate programmers from non-programmers. However, the release of ChatGPT raises concerns about their continued effectiveness in identifying non-programmers. In a simulated attack, we showed that Chat-GPT can easily solve existing screening questions. Therefore, we designed new ChatGPT-resistant screening questions using visual concepts and code comprehension tasks. We evaluated 28 screening questions in an online study with 121 participants involving programmers and non-programmers. Our results showed that questions using visualizations of well-known programming concepts performed best in differentiating between programmers and non-programmers. Participants prompted to use ChatGPT struggled to solve the tasks. They considered ChatGPT ineffective and changed their strategy after a few screening questions. In total, we present six ChatGPT-resistant screening questions that effectively identify non-programmers. We provide recommendations on setting up a ChatGPT-resistant screening instrument that takes less than three minutes to complete by excluding 99.47% of non-programmers while including 94.83% of programmers.