Content area

Abstract

Secure coders’ experiences and their proficiency vary greatly, and any over-looked software security flaws in code can lead to costly repercussions in deployed software applications. The techniques that secure coders utilize to analyze source code and develop mitigation strategies for security flaws are not well understood. Gaining a proper understanding of how coders approach finding and mitigating security flaws can help us efficiently and accurately discover and resolve such issues. One potentially beneficial technique is to collect, analyze, and visualize eye gazes that capture their coding patterns and behaviors. Our systematic literature survey focused on published methods for multiple types of static and dynamic changing eye tracking stimuli, with a particular emphasis on techniques using multiple participant-editable types of stimuli presented simultaneously to simulate a realistic software coding experience. Our work proposes an eye tracking design and analysis framework that breaks down the various stages of software coding. Our decision matrix maps objectives for software programming to analyze techniques for comparing eye gazes among software developers. This involved investigating the limitations of current visualization methods, specifically for user-controlled dynamic stimuli. Our investigation involved using eye tracking technologies to capture how developers write code, use tools, and read natural language documents and instructions. The study encompassed a wide range of tasks, including simultaneously reading documentation, writing code, and using security source coding analysis tools. Software developer tasks and individual actions create complexity in designing eye tracking experiments and analyzing the collected eye gazes. Our approach allows us to explore behaviors across a range of tasks for a single secure coder and among different coders. New visualization techniques were developed to investigate behaviors during secure coding tasks including methods to present transitions among components within and between applications, as well as present coders’ attention levels during secure coding. Our contributions include a literature survey, framework design, secure coding learning modules, scrollable and modifiable eye tracking stimuli analysis, pupil diameter changes analysis, and stimuli presented in different sequences based on individual participants’ behavior. Our contributions focus on comparing and contrasting multiple visualization methods for eye tracking stimuli.

Details

1010268
Title
Eye Tracking Technologies to Analyze and Visualize the Behavior of Secure Coders
Number of pages
461
Publication year
2023
Degree date
2023
School code
0278
Source
DAI-A 85/5(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
ISBN
9798380847247
Advisor
Committee member
Chung, Haeyong; Hauenstein, Jacob; Banerjee, Chaity; Price, Jodi
University/institution
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Department
Computer Science
University location
United States -- Alabama
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
30692908
ProQuest document ID
2892454720
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/eye-tracking-technologies-analyze-visualize/docview/2892454720/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Database
ProQuest One Academic