A Generic Cognitive Dimensions Questionnaire to Evaluate the Usability of Security APIs
This addresses usability evaluation for security APIs to help programmers develop more secure applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on an existing framework.
The study tackled the problem of security vulnerabilities in applications caused by usability issues in security APIs by improving the Cognitive Dimensions framework to evaluate their usability, though no specific results or numbers are provided.
Programmers use security APIs to embed security into the applications they develop. Security vulnerabilities get introduced into those applications, due to the usability issues that exist in the security APIs. Improving usability of security APIs would contribute to improve the security of applications that programmers develop. However, currently there is no methodology to evaluate the usability of security APIs. In this study, we attempt to improve the Cognitive Dimensions framework based API usability evaluation methodology, to evaluate the usability of security APIs.