Crypto Experts Advise What They Adopt
This research addresses the gap in understanding how online advice translates into real-world practice for developers in cryptography, though it is incremental as it builds on prior studies of developer behavior.
The study investigated whether active participants in cryptography discussions on Stack Overflow also apply cryptography in practice, finding that 189 out of 319 identified users used cryptography in their GitHub projects, with 85% using the same programming languages and 90% employing the same cryptographic concepts across both platforms.
Previous studies have shown that developers regularly seek advice on online forums to resolve their cryptography issues. We investigated whether users who are active in cryptography discussions also use cryptography in practice. We collected the top 1% of responders who have participated in crypto discussions on Stack Overflow, and we manually analyzed their crypto contributions to open source projects on GitHub. We could identify 319 GitHub profiles that belonged to such crypto responders and found that 189 of them used cryptography in their projects. Further investigation revealed that the majority of analyzed users (i.e., 85%) use the same programming languages for crypto activity on Stack Overflow and crypto contributions on GitHub. Moreover, 90% of the analyzed users employed the same concept of cryptography in their projects as they advised about on Stack Overflow.