Security Dilemma in Software Development: a Case Study on Understanding Developer Priorities and Practices in Stack Overflow

Applications have advanced rapidly in recent years, taking software development to a whole new level. These advancements have led to a growth in the complexity of applications, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result of this improvement, software security has become a paramount concern for developers, but it has traditionally been overlooked. But now, security issues are evolving day by day. In this paper, we explore developer priorities and practices in term of security in Stack Overflow website, whether they implement their software with security in mind or not. We utilize the Stack Exchange Data Dump to collect and compile a dataset of questions and their corresponding answers related to security vulnerabilities, specifically those that include user-submitted programming code snippets, our analysis concentrates on security-related topics. The experimental results indicate that Python emerged as the most commonly used language for security code snippets across these topics. From the expanded sample of code snippets, several vulnerabilities are flagged for security issues.