Using AI Assistants in Software Development: A Qualitative Study on Security Practices and Concerns
In 2024 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '24), October 14--18, 2024, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Abstract
Following the recent release of AI assistants, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, the software industry quickly utilized these tools for software development tasks, e.g., generating code or consulting AI for advice. While recent research has demonstrated that AI-generated code can contain security issues, how software professionals balance AI assistant usage and security remains unclear. This paper investigates how software professionals use AI assistants in secure software development, what security implications and considerations arise, and what impact they foresee on secure software development. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with software professionals, including software engineers, team leads, and security testers. We also reviewed 190 relevant Reddit posts and comments to gain insights into the current discourse surrounding AI assistants for software development. Our analysis of the interviews and Reddit posts finds that despite many security and quality concerns, participants widely use AI assistants for security-critical tasks, e.g., code generation, threat modeling, and vulnerability detection. Their overall mistrust leads to checking AI suggestions in similar ways to human code, although they expect improvements and, therefore, a heavier use for security tasks in the future. We conclude with recommendations for software professionals to critically check AI suggestions, AI creators to improve suggestion security and capabilities for ethical security tasks, and academic researchers to consider general-purpose AI in software development.Reference
@inproceedings{conf/ccs/klemmer24,
author = {Jan H. Klemmer and
Stefan Albert Horstmann and
Nikhil Patnaik and
Cordelia Ludden and
Cordell Burton Jr and
Carson Powers and
Fabio Massacci and
Akond Rahman and
Daniel Votipka and
Heather Richter Lipford and
Awais Rashid and
Alena Naiakshina and
Sascha Fahl},
booktitle = {In 2024 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '24), October 14--18, 2024, Salt Lake City, UT, USA},
month = {Oct},
publisher = {ACM},
title = {Using AI Assistants in Software Development: A Qualitative Study on Security Practices and Concerns},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06371},
year = {2024}
}